CAIRO—The airport at Egypt’s resort of Sharm el-Sheikh has long had gaps in security, including a key baggage scanning device that often is not functioning and lax searches at an entry gate for food and fuel for the planes, security officials at the airport told The Associated Press.
Security at the airport, and others around Egypt, have become a central concern as investigators probe the Oct. 31 crash of a Russian plane 23 minutes after it left Sharm el-Sheikh, killing all 224 on board. The U.S. and Britain have said the cause was likely a bomb planted on the flight, and Russia has halted flights to Egypt until security at airports is improved.
Seven officials involved in security at Sharm el-Sheikh airport, several for more than a decade, told the AP of the gaps, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the press. Several said the malfunctioning scanner had been noted in security reports to their superiors, but the machine was not replaced.
One of the officials, involved in security for planes, also pointed to bribe-taking by poorly paid policemen monitoring X-ray machines. “I can’t tell you how many times I have caught a bag full of drugs or weapons that they have let through for 10 euros or whatever,” he said.
A spokesman for Egypt’s Aviation Ministry, Mohamed Rahma, dismissed the accounts of inadequate security, saying “Sharm el-Sheikh is one of the safest airports in the world,” without elaborating.
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi has said British officials sent a security team to evaluate the airport 10 months ago, in cooperation with Egyptian officials, and were satisfied with the results.
A spokesman for Britain’s Department of Transportation would not comment on any details of what the team found. But British Transport Secretary Patrick McLoughlin suggested on Friday that screening of checked-in bags was insufficient, telling the BBC that it had imposed its own additional checks on its flights “because we weren’t wholly satisfied with the way screening had been done.”
All bags are put through a scanner as passengers enter Sharm airport, and carry-on bags go through a second machine at the gate before boarding.
But a scanner in the sorting area for checked-in bags often is not working, all the airport officials speaking to AP said.
One of the officials said the breakdowns in the 10-year-old CTX scanner were because operators didn’t use it properly—“human stupidity,” he said—rather than technical faults.
