Men and diamonds

Eight men have shown, last night, that diamonds are not just girls’ best friends. These men love them too. They dressed for the occasion, with clothes roughly cut as police uniforms, and rather inelegantly cut through the chicken wire that surrounds part of the Brussels airport perimeter and drove in two cars to the footsteps of a commercial airliner bound to fly to Zurich. This was a scheduled flight, ready to take passengers and also a few boxes containing many shining stones.

The fellows took the stones and left the area through the same hole in the wire. The catch’s worth is estimated at 50 million dollars. Not bad for a five-minute job. 

All that happened at 20:00 hours, not in the middle of the night. At the international airport of Europe’s capital.

Fortunately, they did it for the beauty of the stones. Imagine they were a terrorist group intended at attacking the airliner and a couple of VIP passengers…

One should feel very concerned.

 As for the airport authorities, they should also feel very embarrassed. 

To be frank, they do not seem to be getting the message. Or at least, they pretend to ignore its gravity. They tell us there are three types of police forces at the airport, so we should consider ourselves safe. But that is exactly the point. When we have different forces in charge of bits of the security of a key facility there is also a serious risk of poor or no coordination among them. In addition, there is too much concern about passenger control and too little about perimeter security. Lack of resources cannot be an acceptable explanation. It is just that the emphasis is too much on checking if I carry any soft cheese – I love Camembert – and not enough on men crazy for diamonds.