‘Ghost fliers’ turn out to be pickpockets

Ahmedabad: The ghost fliers who had sparked off a terror scare at the Ahmedabad airport have been finally nabbed. But it turns out, that they had ambitious plans to take away passengers’ wallets and luggage, not lives.
Sheikh Mohammad Sayad (50), Nizammuddin Gulam Rasool Sheikh (64) and Mohammad Hussain Ibrahim Vohra (60), who were arrested by the Sardarnagar police on Tuesday, are pickpockets. So is Mahendra Sharma, the fourth member of this gang who is on the run.
Sheikh and Vohra are residents of Sindhi Vaad in Jamalpur, while Sayad and Sharma hail from Mumbai and Patna, respectively.
For five consecutive days — from March 22 to 26 — Sayad, Sheikh and Sharma visited the domestic terminal of the airport in the morning and evening. Each time, they purchased air tickets, roamed inside the airport for an hour and walked out after returning the tickets. Vohra, who apparently is not as sharp as the other three, used to enter the airport on a visitor’s pass.
The four members’ suspicious behaviour caught the attention of a Jet Airways’ employee posted at the airline’s ticket counter. She alerted the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF).
Later, the case was referred to the Sardarnagar police, who, along other agencies, launched a hunt for the four. Mirror was the first to report this.
“.. We tracked down three of them with the help of mobile numbers they provided while buying tickets,” an inspector at the Sardarnagar police station, D H Goswami, said.
From March 22, they started visiting the dosmetic terminal. Though they made regular trips to the airport till March 26, they did not succeed in stealing anything, Goswami said.
08/04/10 Zahid Qureshi, Mehul Jani and Akshay Kaushal/Ahmedabad Mirror.com

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Categories: Airports Apr 2010, Safety Apr 2010