A high-level emergency security meeting with officials from various departments including Bureau of Civil Aviation Security (BCAS), Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) and Airports Authority of India (AAI) was convened in the wake of the ministry of external affairs (MES) receiving a bomb hoax call at the Chennai airport.
Meanwhile, a government delegation with National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon, foreign secretary Nirupama Rao left for Colombo at 10.45 am Friday to have talks with the Lankan government over the prevailing issues faced by Tamils in the island nation.
“There was a bomb threat call to the MES control room at around 12.40 noon with the information that a blast would take place at 1 pm on Friday. We took all the precautions including anti-sabotage searches, deploying dog squads and putting local police apart from CISF on high alert,” said CISF chief spokesperson Rohit Katiyar.
According to Mr Kaityar, it took an hour for CISF to complete the search and conclude the call as hoax one. “However we have tightened up the security by deploying more CISF personnel on the city side in civil clothes apart from increasing the protection inside the airport,” he added.
Further, the CISF has begun to frisk passengers outside the security hold area, while complete checking is maintained inside the security area. There are around 800 CISF security personnel at Chennai Airport, which handles around 32,000 passengers and about 310 aircraft movements a day.
When contacted an AAI official said, the Chennai airport will be on high alert till 7 am on Saturday as the caller could have even meant midnight 1 am. So we are prepared to face any worst kind of scenario. All the passengers inside the airport would be frisked as we don’t want to take any chances,” he added. However, according to him, there were no operational delay or flight disruptions.
0 comments:
Post a Comment