DHS orders review of airport security
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson is ordering a comprehensive review of security at “sterile areas” in airports behind metal detectors where passengers board planes and employees work.
Thursday’s announcement by DHS follows Johnson’s tour of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest airport in the country, where authorities say gun smugglers hid firearms and ammunition in backpacks carried aboard Delta Airlines flights to New York City.
Schumer and Thompson said that loophole allowed Delta Airlines ramp agent Eugene Harvey to allegedly smuggle guns into a secure area of the Atlanta airport and then transfer them to a former Delta employee, who put them in a backpack and boarded New York-bound flights.
Former Delta Airlines employee Mark Henry has been charged by Thompson’s office with smuggling backpacks loaded with guns and ammunition on 17 flights to New York between May 8 and Dec. 10 last year.
DHS said it is ordering the Transportation Security Administration to impose “additional requirements for airport and airline employee screening, conducting additional, randomized security countermeasures at employee access points, and introducing additional security patrols by TSA teams of law enforcement and screening professionals.’
Johnson’s visit to Hartsfield-Jackson came a day after Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson asked the agency to close a loophole in airport security.
Schumer said his office has found “very few, if any, airports in the country that require all airline and airport employees’’ to pass through metal detectors.
Schumer and Thompson said that loophole allowed Delta Airlines ramp agent Eugene Harvey to allegedly smuggle guns into a secure area of the Atlanta airport and then transfer them to a former Delta employee, who put them in a backpack and boarded New York-bound flights.
Former Delta Airlines employee Mark Henry has been charged by Thompson’s office with smuggling backpacks loaded with guns and ammunition on 17 flights to New York between May 8 and Dec. 10 last year.
The security loophole was discovered Dec. 10 as part of a long-term investigation into illegal street sales of guns in Brooklyn.
Schumer said Thursday’s he’s pleased by DHS’s quick response.
“When it is as easy to carry guns, explosives and drugs onto an airplane as a neck pillow, it’s high time to overhaul how airports are required to screen employees with access to secure areas of an airport,’’ he said.
