CISF personnel nabbed a 22-year-old man who scaled the airport’s perimeter wall.
The Perimeter Intrusion Detection System (PIDS) installed at Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA) detected its first offender late Thursday night after a 22-year-old man scaled the airport’s perimeter wall. This is the first instance of an intrusion being picked up at the PIDS monitor.
An alarm went off and the patch of the PIDS “wall” began to blink inside the monitoring room at the airport that is manned by CISF and MIAL employees, on Thursday night. A click later, the PIDs monitor showed that the Jarimari side of the airport wall had been breached and a call went off to the CISF duty post, the one nearest to the intrusion point.
But that call came just as the patrolling CISF officials had already “intercepted” Somnath Patil. Around 10.50pm, Patil was caught by CISF personnel near the Jarimari side of the perimeter wall, after he scaled it and jumped into the restricted area of the airport.
The PIDS systems function on 12.5 volts. The seven-ft “wall” is around 10 feet inside the actual perimeter wall of the airport.
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According to CISF officials, nothing “objectionable” was found from Patil, a Nashik resident. “As he was incoherent in his version, he was handed over to the airport police for further investigation and legal action,” said a CISF official.
Patil was taken to the RN Cooper hospital in Juhu for medical examination and was admitted after the doctor confirmed he suffered mental illness, said Yogesh Shinde, police inspector with the Sahar police, who added that Patil’s family, who resided at Deonar, was contacted and the family also confirmed that Patil was not of sound mind.
While the airport has a perimeter of 18.8 km, the PIDS wall is 10.8 km long. The remaining part is inaccessible because of Mithi river and will alert authorities upon such intrusions. At present, around 120 CISF personnel patrol and monitor the perimeter wall with the help of CCTV systems.
On December 24, CISF caught another 23-year-old man attempting to scale the wall twice. It was the first breach attempt in 2014, putting CISF officials on edge. They received around 18 alert messages for the airport in December. The man was also found to be of unsound mind and was subsequently admitted to Cooper hospital.
anjali.lukose@expressindia.com
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