"Scots' airport security misses a hammer"

Monday, August 11, 2003

Scots' airport security misses a hammer
United Kingdom - The Guardian


A Saddam Hussein impersonator has managed to board a flight from Edinburgh
to London with a claw hammer in his hand baggage.

Jeff Mirza, who plays Saddam in his Fringe show Walking with Muslims, walked
on to the EasyJet flight to Stansted unchallenged. The hammer was found by
security staff at the London airport as he tried to board a return flight to
Edinburgh after a film audition in the capital.

He took the hammer with him by mistake on the early morning flight on Friday
within hours of leaving the stage after taking off Saddam and a gallery of
other Islamic bogeymen, including the radical cleric Abu Hamza.

"I was completely flabbergasted and embarrassed by the whole situation," he
said.

"I use the hammer to put together a lectern from which Comical Ali [the
former Iraqi information minister] speaks. Obviously, I am not a terrorist,
but if I had been it shows how easily it can be done. It is very worrying
when you think of it."

Mirza went through security at Stansted and handed the hammer to staff. "I
actually thanked them. They couldn't believe I was able to travel down from
Edinburgh with it."

But an Edinburgh airport spokesman said: "I can't see how anyone with a claw
hammer could have got through our checks. "Security is very tight here; we
pick out tiny nail clippers and files on a regular basis. I don't see how
this could have happened."

* At the Edinburgh Book Festival the novelist Doris Lessing blamed
complacent liberal thinking for the west's failure to stop Robert Mugabe's
regime in Zimbabwe "destroying the country", adding: "Sometimes I wish we
could repeat the old days of the gunboats".

Lessing, who spent most of her early life in Zimbabwe, said: "I know it is
not a good idea generally. But certainly it would be very good for Zimbabwe
if somebody had, because the country is going down the drain."


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