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AIRPORT ‘BOMBER’ OUT OF HIS MIND

The homeless man charged with toting a fake bomb into La Guardia Airport, setting off mass chaos, had been hospitalized for paranoid delusions in June and has no idea “why he’s in trouble” now, sources said yesterday.

Scott McGann, 32, also recently was suicidal, his mother told cops.

“He doesn’t know why he’s in trouble,” said a source at Bellevue Hospital, where McGann, a former Web consultant, was undergoing a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation yesterday.

“He understands being in a hospital because he knows he does have problems, but the situation in the court and the cops and correctional officers ordering him about are confusing him.

“He doesn’t believe he committed a crime.”

Another Bellevue source said McGann — who has been described as “superintelligent but socially dysfunctional” — was previously in the hospital from June 4 to 11, when he was “paranoid delusional and had a persecution complex.”

“He was a pain in the ass,” the source said of McGann’s prior stint, which occurred because of a bizarre incident June 4 in Manhattan Criminal Court.

McGann had been in court that day for a hearing on an unspecified misdemeanor charge when he allegedly snatched a stack of papers from a lawyer’s hands and tried to run from the building. He was arrested and charged with tampering in that case and then hospitalized for a week.

On Saturday, at about 5 a.m., McGann, clad in ragged, dirty clothes, was at La Guardia to catch a flight to California to see relatives and possibly get mental-health treatment when his “strange and suspicious” behavior led a United Airlines ticket agent to alert airport security.

Two Port Authority police officers spotted McGann — and wires coming out of the backpack he was wearing.

Officers Robert Keane and Thomas Sullivan tackled McGann and ripped the wires from his arms as he pressed a trigger device connected to a would-be bomb — which turned out to be several batteries that had been taped together, with no explosives.

The incident spurred an evacuation of the airport, and scores of flights there and around the country were canceled or delayed.

Law-enforcement sources said McGann — who didn’t utter a word during his arrest or his later appearance in Queens Criminal Court on Saturday — “has that thousand-yard stare.”

They described him as a “scary guy” who has offered no clue as to why he wanted to bring what he apparently believed to be a real bomb onto a plane.

A Brooklyn woman, Angela Bajada, whose granddaughter’s Web site was built by McGann, said, “He was clean, very nice,” and did not seem mentally ill when she met him several times earlier this year.

“Maybe he needs medication or to be put in a hospital. Thank God, no one was hurt,” Bajada said.

Mayor Bloomberg yesterday praised the PA cops for subduing McGann, saying, “They didn’t know when they grabbed this guy whether or not the alleged bomb was real or fake.

“I think this is somebody more mentally deranged than anything else, but I’ll point out that the police found him and stopped him, and, fortunately, he didn’t have a real bomb. If he did, however, some of our police officers might’ve given their lives.”

Meanwhile, business was back to normal at La Guardia yesterday.

But Amy Bissaillon-Forestier, a 35-year-old counselor headed back home to Chicago, said, “I’m a little concerned.”

“This is my first trip to New York,” she said, “something like this is a little scary, [that] someone like that can just walk in here.”

Additional reporting by Sally Goldenberg, Sabrina Ford and Edmund DeMarche

cj.sullivan@nypost.com