We’ve all been there before: waiting anxiously for our bags to come out on the conveyor belt at the airport.
More often than not, the bags do arrive.
But for some 220 passengers on Singapore Airlines and SilkAir, the experience was far from pleasant.
At least 286 bags never arrived at their final destination, all because of one man.
Former baggage handler Mr Tay Boon Keh manually swapped the bag tags, which means that bags ended up in different cities from their owners.
Mr Tay committed the offences between November 2016 and February 2017.
On Friday (27 Oct), Mr Tay, 65, pleaded guilty to 20 counts of mischief. For each count, offenders can be jailed for up to a year and fined. That means Mr Tay could go to jail for up to 20 years.
Mr Tay claims that he swapped the bag tags out of frustration with his then-employer, Lian Cheng Contracting.
Lian Cheng Contracting is a sub-contractor of Changi Airport Group.
According to Mr Tay, he was overworked and did not have manpower support. A machine used to screen bags often broke down and Mr Tay had to physically carry the bags 6 metres to the nearest available machine.
The prosecution charged,
Finally, out of frustration and anger at Lian Cheng, the accused came up with a plan to swAp the baggage tags attached to the luggage bags that he handled with other baggage tags. The accused was alone when he performed the swApping of the tags, and he did it at an area which was out of CCTV view.
Passengers complained that their baggage had been tampered with and SIA and SilkAir reps stepped in.
They complained about the matter to SATS, which lodged a police report.
In response to the incident, Changi Airport Group has stepped up patrols as well as increased CCTV cameras in the baggage handling areas.
Featured image from Wikipedia.
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