Experts urge more attention to screening baggage on airlines

We have said for a while that the next technological and business frontier in airline security is baggage security — and that it may well be the case that a new balance has to be fashioned between attention being paid to screening passengers and that being paid to screening baggage carried in the hull of passenger planes. Others agree. Governments and airlines are “fighting the last war” by screening luggage and passengers for terrorist threats — at the same time all but ignoring the cargo shipments in aircraft holds, a committee investigating the lessons of the 1985 Air India explosion heard. Kathleen Sweet, a University of Connecticut academic and security consultant, predicted that future attackers are unlikely to adopt the same tactics used by Sikh extremists in the 1985 Air India bombing, or by al-Qaeda in the 9/11 suicide attacks in the United States. “Terrorists aren’t stupid,” Sweet told the inquiry headed by former Canadian Supreme Court justice John Major. “Many of them are well-educated, well-financed … They sit around all day thinking about how they’re going to kill us in unique and new ways.”

She pointed to air cargo operations as one of the most vulnerable points in the current security system — and one of the most likely avenues of attack in future. “We have focused so much on passengers and passenger baggage that we have failed to recognize there is a huge part of the aircraft that is loaded up with pallets of cargo … How and where and when that cargo is screened is a huge gap, not just here in Canada but in the United States as well.”

Rodney Wallis, a British security expert who has served with the International Civil Aviation Organization, said the situation is better in Europe, where authorities take more care in monitoring the flow of cargo from manufacturer, to truck or rail shipper, to airport. Nevertheless, he agreed improvements are needed in the whole of the international system. “It’s sad,” said Wallis. “We have known cargo to be a problematic area for 30 years. Since 1985, we’ve been trying to do something about it and we’re still not there.”

The Edmonton Sun reports that similar criticism has come from a Senate committee, chaired by Liberal MP Colin Kenny, and from an advisory panel commissioned by the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority.

Sweet added a chilling note by raising the possibility that future attackers could expand their horizon far beyond simple bombings, hijackings, and suicide missions. In a written report for the inquiry, she said it was time to start “thinking unthinkable thoughts” about whether they could use crude nuclear technology to build dirty bombs, or employ biological or chemical weapons. “We have to start thinking like the bad guys,” she said. “I think they’re going to do things that not only hurt people but scare them to death.”

The inquiry is focusing on the bombing of Air India Flight 182 in June 1985, but it is also examining the evolution of terrorist tactics and the security reforms needed to avert future tragedies.

Michael: The text below should be in a blue box

The bombing of Air-India Flight 182

Air India’s Boeing 747 exploded on 23 June 1985 while at an altitude of 31,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, south of Ireland. All 329 on board were killed, of whom 280 were Canadian citizens. Until the 9/11 attacks, the Air India bombing was the deadliest terrorist attack involving aircraft.

The Air India trial became notorious in Canadian jurisprudence because the investigation and prosecution took almost twenty years and were the costliest in Canadian history. On 16 March 2005, the two men accused of the bombing, Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagriwere, were found not guilty by Justice Ian Josephson and were released. The only person convicted of involvement in the bombing was Inderjit Singh Reyat who, on 10 February 2003, pled guilty to manslaughter in constructing the bomb used on Flight 182 and received a five-year sentence.