London airport security frightened of imaginary cartoon robot with imaginary gun

Man threatened with arrest at Heathrow for wearing Transformers T-shirt
The Evening Standard (UK)

An airline passenger claimed that a security guard threatened to arrest him because he was wearing a T-shirt showing a cartoon robot with a gun.

Brad Jayakody, 30, from London, said he was stopped from passing through security at Heathrow's Terminal 5 after his Transformers T-shirt was deemed 'offensive.'

The IT consultant was set to fly off on a business trip to Dusseldorf in Germany when he was pulled to one side.

Mr Jayakody said the first guard started joking with him about the Transformers character depicted on his French Connection T-shirt.

'"Then he explains that since Megatron is holding a gun, I'm not allowed to fly,' he said.

'It's a 40ft tall cartoon robot with a gun as an arm. There is no way this shirt is offensive in any way, and what I'm going to use the shirt to pretend I have a gun?

He was cooperative with the supervisor and took off the the 'offensive' T-shirt, replacing it with another shirt in his carry on luggage.

Mr. Jayakody was mistreated and threatened for one, and only one reason. Care to guess the reason?



If Mr. Jayakody were white and his name was "Baker" he would never have been stopped.

A spokesman for Heathrow operator BAA said: 'If a T-shirt had a rude word or a bomb on it, for example, a passenger may be asked to remove it.

'We are investigating what happened to see if it came under this category.

'If it's offensive, we don't want other passengers upset.'

He said there was no record of the incident and the passenger 'certainly didn't make a formal complaint at the time.'

Maybe because people who file complaints tend to wind up in custody, or missing future flights due to "security".

Despite getting rid of Blair, Britain still yearns to be an American-style police state.

No less stupid is this story:

The Colt .45 hung cold around her neck, like a pendant.

Because it was a pendant.

On Monday, Marnina Norys, a 39-year-old PhD student of social political thought at York University, was forced to remove a piece of silver jewellery cast in the shape of an antique pistol by airport security in Kelowna, B.C., who feared the trinket posed a security risk to the passengers on her WestJet flight.

Approaching the security desk, Norys says she was stunned when guards labelled the 5-centimetre pendant, with no bullets or moving parts, a replica firearm.

"When the woman pointed at the pendant I had no idea what she was talking about," said Norys, who was informed that replica firearms are banned from planes.

OK, at least this was something that looked like an actual gun, except for the fact that it was barely two inches long and made of silver.

Somewhere in Paksitan, Osama bin-Laden is laughing his ass off. He has managed to inflict terror to the point of absurdity. People have reached a level of irrational fear that they are see threats everywhere, in everything.

"It was the applied symbolism that was the issue here. So what if I have guns on my T-shirt ... or a gun tattooed on my neck? Is that going to make people uneasy?"

The answer is "yes". You would have been denied passage, or been detained for interrogation.

OK, that said, this is the amazing part.

Norys has since received an apology from the Canadian Air Transport Authority (CATSA).

"The screening officer involved made a judgment call, rather than refer to CATSA's standard operating procedures," Dave Smith, director of screening operations with CATSA, wrote in a letter to Norys.

"In retrospect, your revolver-shaped pendant is not a threat and should have been allowed on board the aircraft."

They apologized? They admitted error? Shocking!