Target dangerous people, not just luggage, Air India inquiry told

Ottawa: Security screeners should be trying to weed out dangerous people, not just dangerous luggage, in their effort to head off terrorist threats to commercial airlines, the Air India inquiry has heard.
Reg Whitaker, who chaired a Transport Canada advisory panel which reviewed the 1985 bombing, testified Friday that "behavioural profiling" of would-be passengers may help prevent future tragedies.
Whitaker, a University of Victoria political scientist and expert in intelligence issues, pointed to the celebrated case of M. Singh, the fictitious name of the man who delivered the bomb-laden suitcase that ultimately brought down Flight 182 and killed 329 people.
He arrived at a CP Air counter in Vancouver, picked up a ticket that had been booked at the last minute by someone else, paid over $1,000 cash on the spot and demanded that his suitcase be checked through to New Delhi, even though he didn't have a confirmed reservation on a connecting Air India flight in Toronto.
It was a textbook example of "all the kind of red flags that should have been there, to indicate that there was something very, very, very wrong with this individual," said Whitaker.
"If the CP ticket agent . . . had been trained and qualified and empowered to recognize and act on those kinds of indicators, Mr. Singh could have been set aside for further attention - which would have, in fact, revealed what he was actually about."
Raj Anand, one of the lawyers for the families of the Air India victims, was less convinced of the usefulness of passenger profiling.
He maintained that, if better baggage screening had been in place for the CP Air and Air India flights, "one wouldn't have needed behavioural or racial profiling to have caught the bag."
01/06/07 Jim Brown/Canada East, Canada

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Categories: Air India Jun 2007, Foreign Jun 2007, Safety Jun 2007