Youths Held in Smoke Bomb Case : Burbank: Dozens of guests flee the fumes after a grenade goes off at a hotel. Another is set off at a restaurant.

Three teen-agers have been arrested for allegedly setting off smoke grenades at a fast-food restaurant and at a Holiday Inn in Burbank, forcing the evacuation of dozens of hotel guests because of noxious fumes, police said Wednesday.

No one was injured in either incident.

The three Burbank youths, all 17, were arrested about 10 p.m. Tuesday across the street from the Holiday Inn in the 100 block of East Angeleno Avenue. Firefighters were busy at the time dousing a grenade that filled the first and second floors of the hotel with an acrid smoke “extremely harmful to the respiratory system,” Police Sgt. Don Goldberg said.

About 40 people from the two floors were evacuated.

Firefighters found the grenade--a kind designed for use by military and law-enforcement agencies--inside an elevator on the first floor, Goldberg said. The fumes had apparently billowed through the shaft up to the second floor, activating a smoke alarm there.

Robert Steele, 48, a guest at the hotel, told police he noticed a youth running from the second floor immediately after the alarm sounded. Officers searched the immediate area with Steele, who identified a youth standing with two others “watching all the excitement” from the parking lot of the Bombay Bicycle Club, a restaurant across from the hotel, Goldberg said.

The youths were arrested and their residences searched. Police recovered three more grenades but could not determine how the youths obtained them, Goldberg said.

Detectives linked the teen-agers to an incident earlier Tuesday night at Tommy’s Hamburgers in the 1300 block of San Fernando Boulevard. The same type of grenade was flung into a restroom about 8:30 p.m. and spewed smoke until firefighters extinguished it.

Goldberg said the youths had made “some admissions of wrongdoing” during questioning, but he declined to elaborate. The three could be charged with possession and explosion of a destructive device--a felony, Goldberg said.

The youth identified by Steele remained in Sylmar juvenile hall Wednesday. The other two were released to their parents Tuesday night, Goldberg said.

Executives of the Holiday Inn declined to comment.