Delhi airport wears baggage theft crown

New Delhi: Claiming to be one of the world’s best airport, Delhi’s IGI airport tops the list of nine airports in baggage thefts across the country.  About 56 per cent of the total baggage thefts across various airports took place at IGI airport from January 2016 till May 2019.

Since January 2016 to May 31, 2019, a total 210 theft cases were reported or registered at various airports, among which 118 incidents were alone reported in Delhi airport. 52 cases were reported at Mumbai airport for the same period. Hyderabad airport came third in the list with 32 cases, Kolkata 4 and Amritsar, Jammu, Cochin, Dehradun and Chennai airport reported one each.

Although Delhi police claimed that incidents of baggage theft have gone down in the past few years, cases of theft increase during the summer and festive season. While a total of 22 cases of theft have been reported at IGI airport till the end of May this year, 28 in 2018, the figure stood at 34 in 2017, and 34 in 2016.

Sources said bag lifters are tipped off about an expensive baggage while they are being scanned. After the baggage come out of the scanners, the housekeeping staffs pass on the information to ground handlers. The ground handlers, in turn, identify the luggage and inform the loaders or baggage handlers.

“We use to get number of complainants where locks of luggage have been broken. The handlers carry needles or screwdrivers and make a small hole in the luggage and take out the valuables. They put the lock or zip back in place,” said an airport official.

However, aviation security watchdog, the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS), has taken a slew of measures to check incidents of theft, including setting up of help-desks by the CISF to enable passengers to register complaints about missing baggage, frisking of ground handling staff and deployment of airline security staff around the cargo-hold area of the airline.