Beware of airport bag thief

Calcutta: In a shocker by even Calcutta airport standards, an offender who figures in the rogues’ gallery was caught after a chase across the domestic terminal building following an alarm from a passenger who saw the man rummaging his laptop bag near the conveyor belt on Monday morning.
Ushakant Janardan Sonawane, in his mid-fifties, tried to run out of the building but security personnel caught him near the arrival exit gate.
Prosenjit Nag, a businessman from Calcutta, was returning from a vacation in Port Blair. Nag, a resident of Cossipore in north Calcutta, arrived around 10.15am on an Air India flight along with his wife Sushmita, brother-in-law Sudip Sarkar and his family.
The two families had five pieces of checked-in luggage and Nag was carrying his laptop bag as cabin luggage.
“At the conveyor belt, I put the laptop bag on a trolley and was waiting for my baggage when I saw an elderly person trying to take the trolley,” said Nag. When confronted, the man apologised and slunk away.
As Prosenjit and Sudip got busy collecting and putting their bags on the trolley, Sudip’s daughter Sreya, in her teens, spotted a man in a white shirt rummaging her uncle’s laptop bag. “She raised an alarm and caught the man’s hand before he could take it out,” said Prosenjit.
The family raised an alarm and three CISF personnel rushed to the conveyor belt. The man meanwhile had freed himself and started running to the arrival exit gate. “Our men ran after him, caught him and handed him over to the police,” said a CISF officer.
Sonawane, a resident of Mumbai, had arrived at Calcutta airport on Monday morning on an Air India flight from Mumbai and was waiting at the conveyor belt for a soft target.
Sonawane and two others were caught in the act at the Calcutta airport in July last year. “They were also arrested several times at Mumbai airport,” said an official.
08/02/12 THe Telegraph

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Categories: airports Feb 2012