Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz announced on Tuesday that Ben Gurion International Airport security would no longer mark the luggage belonging to non-Jews with colored tags, in order to spare these passengers embarrassment.
Instead, Mofaz explained, the luggage of non-Jewish passengers will be stamped with the same color sticker as the Jewish passengers, only with a different number. In the past, the color of the sticker on the passenger's luggage would indicate to airport security personnel the level of security check they must administer.
This practice mainly affected Arab passengers.
source
1 comment:
Flight lessons from Israel
Experts: Above all, screening passengers is key to safer skies
Israel's national airline, El Al, has been touted for decades as the world’s safest, despite — or perhaps because of — its home base in a nation that faces domestic terrorism constantly.
It wasn’t surprising, then, that the first plane leaving the New York area when flights resumed after Sept. 11 was an El Al 747 headed for Tel Aviv. After 33 years of terror-free flying, the government-run airline and its home airport, Tel-Aviv’s Ben Gurion, where security is tight as a drum for all carriers, have become blueprints for the way U.S. aviation security ought to work.
In his November testimony before a House committee on improving air security, former El Al security chief Isaac Yeffet cited numerous examples of these foiled attempts at terror.
Yeffet told the story of a 1986 flight that might well have been destroyed except for Israel’s unusual security measures. A young, pregnant Irish woman tried to board that flight at London’s Heathrow airport to fly to Tel Aviv. She carried a bag packed by her Jordanian boyfriend ostensibly filled with “gifts” for his family in Israel. Unbeknownst to the woman, the bag was actually a ticking bomb, set to go off somewhere over Greece.
Post a Comment