DOHA: Interpol Secretary-General Ronald K Noble has warned that shortcomings in international passenger screening threaten global security.
Speaking on the changing nature of security threats beyond 2020 at the Aviation Security and Border Control Summit in Doha, Noble pointed to ‘a gaping hole in aviation security’ when some four out of every 10 international passengers are still not screened against Iinterol’ss Stolen and Lost Travel (SLTD) international database, containing almost 40 million records, which produced more than 60,000 hits last year.
He highlighted the case of Samantha Lewthwaite, the so-called ‘white widow’ of a London July 2005 suicide bomber, currently wanted internationally by Kenya for possession of explosives and at large with aliases linked to a fraudulent passport and a passport reported stolen.
Noble also recalled how Ramzi Yousef, convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York, and Milorad Ulemek, convicted of the 2003 assassination of Serbia’s former prime minister Zoran Djindjic, both committed their crimes after travelling internationally on stolen passports.
“We still rely on a model where governments are left alone to screen the waves of individuals crossing borders on a daily basis. A model where in far too many countries we wait for threats to reach an airport, before trying to identify them as such – when it is just tragically too late, as history has taught us,” he said.
Noble said that the number of individuals flying across borders set to rise from one billion in 2010 to 1.95 billion by 2025.
The Peninsula
