No specific law to deal with pranksters on flights

New Delhi: The hijack hoax played by an unarmed Indigo airline passenger has exposed a legal lacuna there is no specific provision for penalizing those who inflict such trauma and inconvenience on others travelling in the aircraft without any actual physical danger to them.
The police, therefore, invoked a provision that deals with a hijack that was real. Section 3 of the Suppression of Unlawful Act Against Safety of Civil Aviation Act, 1982, imposes life sentence for a range of offences committed on board an aircraft in flight.
The clause invoked by the police Section 3(1)(a) against the errant passenger, Jitendra Kumar Mohla, pertains to anybody who "unlawfully and intentionally commits an act of violence against a person on board an aircraft in flight which is likely to endanger the safety of such aircraft.''
This offence is considered so serious that another clause of Section 3 unusually prescribes a penalty of same severity (life sentence) even for those who have merely "attempted'' or "abetted'' it. Since it is a non-bailable offence, the court on Monday remanded Mohla to 14-day judicialcustody.
But this charge is unlikely to stick because it wasn't a real hijack attempt. Therefore, the prosecution is likely to fall back on the two general provisions from the Indian Penal Code that have been included in the case. The more serious among those IPC offences is "criminal intimidation'' which in its aggravated form is punishable with imprisonment up to seven years.
According to Section 503 of the Indian Penal Code, "whoever threatens another with any injury...with intent to cause alarm to that person... commits criminal intimidation.'' Section 506 says that the offence is ordinarily punishable with imprisonment up to two years. It adds that "if the threat be to cause death or grievous hurt, or to cause the destruction of any property'', the offender could get a maximum sentence of seven years.
The mildest provision that Mohla has been booked under is Section 336 IPC dealing with acts endangering life or personal safety of others. The penalty for this does not extend beyond three months as it is about any act done "so rashly or negligently as to endanger human life or the personal safety of others.''
03/02/09 Manoj Mitta/Times of India

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Categories: Indian Aviation- In General Feb 2009, Indigo Airlines Feb 2009, Safety Feb 2009