Belfast International Airport has ‘questions to answer’ over departures brawl

Social media footage of the disturbance showed two groups of men wielding metal poles and throwing other items at each other.

The PSNI said a link between the brawl and an earlier altercation in a Co Londonderry graveyard involving members of the Travelling community was “a line of enquiry”.

The length of time for security personnel to reach the incident was criticised along with the decision to only prevent four of the men allegedly involved from boarding their flights.

Describing the incident as “regrettable”, South Antrim UUP MLA Steve Aiken said “both the PSNI and the airport police have questions to answer”.

He told the News Letter: “I would welcome any comment from them as to how they are going ensure this doesn’t happen again.”

Speaking on the Nolan Show, former police officer Jim Gamble said: “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that there needs to be a fundamentally independent review of what went on. The airport are saying one thing while videos and eyewitness testimony are saying another.

“We need to have confidence rebuilt in those who are running Belfast International Airport.”

Mayor of Antrim, Councillor Paul Michael said: “One can only be horrified to see this footage, although the difficulty with seeing clips like this on social media, is it sometimes looks worse than it is. That said, there needs to be questions answered in terms of the internal security at the airport.

“People have been talking about the timings, how people could have stood about filming it, but no one from the airport is seen to be intervening.”

The airport said yesterday that commentary on the incident has been “misleading and inaccurate”.

Contradicting some eyewitness reports that the incident had gone on for as long as half an hour, an airport spokesperson said the disturbance started at 6.01pm and lasted for seven minutes. After being made aware of the incident by airport control, they said that airport police attended within three minutes.

The spokesperson said: “The airport will not tolerate behaviour such as this and takes such incidents very seriously. It acknowledges the concern and upset felt by passengers who witnessed the altercation. No-one was injured and four individuals did not travel. There was insufficient grounds to prevent the remainder of the group from travelling and alcohol was not an issue.

“It is disappointing that an ex senior police officer made ill-informed comments on the management and policing of the airport. Senior management have reached out to the individual involved him to appraise him of the facts.”