Fence hole chaos at Airport

Published on Wednesday 29 June 2011 08:16

Hundreds of passengers were stuck on planes at Edinburgh Airport for up to two hours as police investigated a "security breach" - believed to be a hole in the perimeter fence.

&#149 The airport terminal was evacuated after the discovery of a 'security breach'

The terminal was evacuated last night with some passengers having to leave without their luggage.

Others waiting to board planes had to be reprocessed through security following the alert, which was sparked at around 10.30pm.

Passengers on incoming flights were eventually offloaded through the terminal one flight at a time in the middle of the night.

Airport spokesman Gordon Robertson said he could not confirm the nature of the security breach.

He said it had taken two hours to reprocess passengers through security, but everyone who had planned to fly had done so.

He added that the airport would today be working with passengers who had elected to avoid further delays by leaving their luggage behind during the evacuation, in order to reunite them with their bags.

Pete Wishart, MP for Perth and North Perthshire, was on a flight from Heathrow which had already been delayed due to stormy weather in London.

He said: "We eventually arrived at Edinburgh Airport just after midnight last night to a message that there had been a hole in the fence around Edinburgh Airport perimeter and no one was getting off the plane.

"We sat for an hour and during that time found out that there were another 13 planes in the same position as us - this was from the pilot who was trying to get to us as much information about what was going on as he could.

"The police had decided that we had to sit there for security reasons, and that was us for maybe two hours. We got off the plane at the back of two. Just one plane was allowed to get off at a time, and there was a queue for who had arrived first and who was going to get off first, and we were at the back of that.

"The whole airport had been cleared. It looked like nobody was going in or out at all, initially the airport was empty and by the end of it, it was starting to get back to normal.

"I suppose these things are necessary. I don't know what sort of risk assessment was undertaken but they seem to have upped the ante because no one knew what was going on."

A police spokesman said officers had been called to the airport at around 10.30pm and were still in attendance this morning, but he was unable to give any more details of the nature of the security breach: "We dealt with an incident last night following reports of a breach of airport security," he said.