Nigeria Installs Full Body Scanners at Airports
•As US marshals accompany flights
By Paul Ohia and Zacheaus Somorin, 08.12.2010
The training of local staff has commenced to handle full body scanners acquired following the Christmas day bomb attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab even as Air Marshals from the United States now guard flights coming in and out of Nigeria.
“Full-body scanners have been installed at Nigeria 's four international airports and are being used selectively,” the Director-General of Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Mr. Harold Demuren, said at a joint press briefing with the United States ambassador to Nigeria, Dr. Robin Renée Sanders in Lagos yesterday.
Demuren said training is ongoing for officers with the goal of having the scanners which have been installed at Murtala Mohammed International Airport in Lagos and Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja operating 24 hours a day.
For the time being, the machines have not been installed at similar airports in Kano and Port Harcourt .
“We want to make our airports extremely unfriendly to terrorists…explosive detection equipment are already being used and full body pat-downs for international passengers will not allow such to happens again." Demuren said.
He disclosed that ten of such scanners which create a 3-D images of passengers’ shape have been acquired by the government
Ambassador Sanders said that Nigeria should be commended for the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority’s successful completion of Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] assistance program in preparation for the Aviation Safety Assessment [IASA] audit.
She posited also that although there is still more job to be done in the sector, it is important to celebrate the tremendous progress and success of the government in making the nation’s air travel the safest it has ever been.
Sanders who would be leaving Nigeria soon congratulated the NCCA for its historical issuance of Air Operator Certification [AOC] to Arik Air Limited on July 12, this year. She however said that Nigerian aviation sector has not been able to obtain Category 1 status the way other developed countries have.
Responding to her comment, Demuren said ‘’security challenge is a global one. It is not only an American issue, it is not the Netherland issue, and not Nigerian issue but a global one. So, the war on terror must be total’’. Demuren promised that the December 20th December 2009 bomb incident, with security measures being put in place by the NCAA, will never happen again, saying that body scanners have been made available in all he major airports in the country with the provision of ten scanners by the Federal Government.
While recounting on Abdulmutallab’s bomb case, which resulted in Nigeria in being included in the global terror list by the United States, Demuren said that on the fateful day, the equipment available at the Lagos Airports are those that could only detect metals, but that now all the international airport in the country have automatic detecting systems at different four stages before boarding flight to another country.
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