Several passengers billed to travel out of the country in the early morning on Friday missed their flights at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos, due to malfunctioning X-ray screening machines.

As part of safety and precautionary measures, passengers are subjected to thorough screening before they are allowed to board flights to prevent anyone getting into the aircraft with incendiary or other dangerous devices.

But on Friday morning, it was learnt that four out of five X-ray screening machines located at the central search of D and E wings malfunctioned, leaving hundreds of passengers to be screened with only one machine.

This caused undue delays; even as some of the passengers were not screened as at the time their flights took off.

Most of the travellers affected, THISDAY gathered, were Virgin Atlantic Airways passengers and others on West Coast destinations.

The General Manager, Corporate Affairs of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN), Mrs. Henrietta Yakubu, confirmed the incident but said that two more X-ray machines were deployed shortly after, while the malfunctioned ones were being repaired.

She denied that passengers missed their flights, saying as a last resort, the FAAN Aviation Security (AVSEC) had to adopt manual screening to ensure that the passengers boarded their flights.

She also noted that before the Friday incident, many of the X-ray machines rarely malfunction at the same time.

THISDAY investigation, however, revealed that most of the time the five X-ray machines don’t work at the same time.

Regular travellers said that rarely could three out of the five be working at the same time; that even when the machines do not malfunction, FAAN may not deploy adequate security personnel to man all the equipment.

•Excerpted from THISDAY report