Airport staff stole jewels: Doctor

CHENNAI: A doctor from Adyar filed a complaint on behalf of his son-in-law, who found his 60 sovereigns jewellery missing from his baggage after he landed at the Chennai Airport from Singapore. PM Sheriff, a doctor of Nehru Nagar, Adyar, said in his plaint that his son-in-law H Jamal Mohammad, a Singapore-based IT professional, landed at the Chennai airport on July 28 with his family for a relative’s wedding. They had landed at 10 pm and were held up at the airport till 11.30 pm for the immigration check. After spending one and a half hours at the immigration, Sheriff and his family went in search of their baggage but they could not find their bags at the conveyor belt.  Finally, they found four of their bags stacked up in a trolley in a corner of the building. An airport assistant then handed it over them, claimed the plaint. They then left for home.The next day, when they opened one of the bags, they found 60 sovereigns of gold missing along with the jewel boxes. “Even the zip of the bag was found tampered with a three inch gaping hole,” said Sheriff. The complainant claimed he had 30 gold bangles, a bracelet, a thali chain and a forehead chain. They then lodged a complaint with the airport police, who gave them a CSR. “My son-in-law identified his baggage in the scan monitor and the airport assistant who gave them the baggage in the CCTV footage. He suspected that the assistant could have stolen the jewellery,” said the complainant. Since the IT professional left for Singapore on August 2, his father-in-law lodged a complaint with the suburban deputy commissioner, headquarters, asking for an FIR to be filed.The airport police said that they have already begun investigation into the case. “Firstly, we don’t know why they kept half the gold jewellery in the hand baggage and half in the check-in baggage. Secondly, there was no way a conveyor operator could steal from the baggage as it is located near the bay and some officer or the other keeps supervising them. We are probing if the complainants lost the jewellery here or in Singapore as we have heard many such complaints from passengers, who traveled in the same carrier,” according to  Arockia Ravindran, airport inspector.