New Delhi: In a serious aviation security lapse, a “used stun grenade” was found in the aisle of an Air India Boeing 747 jumbo jet at the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah on Friday night, prompting Air India to suspend two of its security managers at Mumbai and Hyderabad.
This was confirmed by top civil aviation ministry sources who said the used stun grenade was incapable of being detonated. The used stun grenade appears to have been left behind after a drill conducted by security agencies dealing with VVIP security in the last week of September.
Sources said orders have also been issued for suspension of ground-handling officers as well as security supervisors who took over the plane from the security agencies. The plane had completed a flight on the Mumbai-Hyderabad-Jeddah route when a cabin crew member noticed that a “suspicious object” had come rolling out into the aisle from underneath the seat of a passenger on the upper deck of the aircraft. The aircraft was said to be the same one which was kept at Delhi airport as a standby recently for VVIP duty before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the United States.
The government ordered a high-level probe into the incident by a committee headed by both the joint managing director of Air India and the commissioner of security, civil aviation. The NSG, too, will conduct its own investigation.
But Air India had to suffer embarrassment by Saturday evening after it seemed to have attempted a cover-up initially by describing the object in a statement as a “plastic wrapper” when civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju revealed the truth by describing the object as a (used) stun grenade and referred to the incident as a “security failure”.
05/10/15 Sridhar Kumaraswami/The Asian Age
To Read the News in full at Source, Click the Headline
This was confirmed by top civil aviation ministry sources who said the used stun grenade was incapable of being detonated. The used stun grenade appears to have been left behind after a drill conducted by security agencies dealing with VVIP security in the last week of September.
Sources said orders have also been issued for suspension of ground-handling officers as well as security supervisors who took over the plane from the security agencies. The plane had completed a flight on the Mumbai-Hyderabad-Jeddah route when a cabin crew member noticed that a “suspicious object” had come rolling out into the aisle from underneath the seat of a passenger on the upper deck of the aircraft. The aircraft was said to be the same one which was kept at Delhi airport as a standby recently for VVIP duty before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the United States.
The government ordered a high-level probe into the incident by a committee headed by both the joint managing director of Air India and the commissioner of security, civil aviation. The NSG, too, will conduct its own investigation.
But Air India had to suffer embarrassment by Saturday evening after it seemed to have attempted a cover-up initially by describing the object in a statement as a “plastic wrapper” when civil aviation minister Ashok Gajapathi Raju revealed the truth by describing the object as a (used) stun grenade and referred to the incident as a “security failure”.
05/10/15 Sridhar Kumaraswami/The Asian Age
