Left luggage saga: Hong Kong aviation insiders say airlines have power to help passengers like they did with chief executive’s daughter
CY Leung’s office clarifies that he did not talk to Airport Authority officials, though he did speak with airline staff
Pressure is mounting for the Hong Kong government to reveal its full airport security protocol to stem public worries of a breach over the delivery of a piece of left-behind luggage to Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying’s daughter from a non-restricted to a closed-off area.
It came as Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying insisted yesterday he had not exerted pressure on airport staff to bypass security and deliver the luggage to his daughter Chung-yan, who was at a boarding gate at the time.
Leung said that if his daughter had wanted to invoke a special privilege “she would have called me or her mother an hour before the flight took off”. He added: “If I really wanted to intervene, I could have called the senior management from the airline or the security company. But we absolutely did not.”
He also said he only learned of the incident when he called Chung-yan, 23, to say goodbye before she boarded the Cathay Pacific flight to San Francisco on March 28. It was already past midnight and the flight was scheduled to leave at 12:30am.
Leung further denied accusations from Apple Daily that he asked airline staff to address him as “Chief Executive Leung”. He said he only told staff he was the “father of passenger Leung Chung-yan”.
But questions lingered as to who made the decision to deliver the item into the restricted zone.
Grilled by reporters yesterday, Secretary for Security Lai Tung-kwok said there were principles covering how left luggage could be delivered into a restricted area: the owner had to be identified; the luggage needed to go through security inspection; and the luggage should pose no aviation risks.
Lai said similar deliveries had been made in the past and that was why the Airport Authority said on Thursday no security procedures had been breached.
He did not say who had the power to decide whether a third party could deliver a passenger’s luggage into a restricted area on the passenger’s behalf.
Aviation insiders said under the Aviation Security Ordinance the security minister needed to draw up a security protocol called the Aviation Security Programme. The problem was that the programme was not made publicly available and so it was unclear who had power to approve luggage delivery by a third party, according to a commercial pilot.
Former director general of civil aviation Albert Lam Kwong-yu claimed that airlines were allowed to deliver left luggage to their passengers from non-restricted to restricted areas.
A source with security firm Avseco said its staff did not deny the younger Leung’s request to go out and retrieve the bag herself.
“If she wanted to go back out, she had to pass immigration, and inform the airline. There are a lot of formalities and she could miss her flight,” the source said. “It would be an enormous hassle.”
