The British government on Monday introduced emergency restrictions on air freight as other countries considered their response to last week’s discovery of two bombs on board cargo jets bound for the US.
'Financial Times' newspaper quoted Theresa May, UK Home Secretary, as saying she was suspending all unaccompanied air freight traffic from Somalia, banning air passengers from carrying printer cartridges larger than 500g in hand luggage and stopping the shipping of cartridges by air from unapproved sources via or from the UK.
The two explosive devices were discovered inside printer cartridges at the UK’s East Midlands airport and in Dubai after tip-offs to the intelligence services. The packages were bound from Yemen to the addresses of synagogues in Chicago.
May said the printer cartridge ban would be in place for at least a month to give the government time to “work closely with the aviation industry, screening equipment manufacturers and others, to devise a sustainable, proportionate, long-term security regime to address the threat”.
Components such as computer chips, computers and other manufactured goods tend to move on a “known shipper” basis, David Lara, a senior air freight executive for Netherlands-based Ceva Logistics, said. Such long-term customers gave logistics providers 24 hours’ notice of any goods movements and provide operators with assurances about the security of their supply chain.
“If you’re IBM and you’re shipping computers manufactured in Asia to the US or various parts of Europe and you’re shipping two, five or 10 tonnes at a time, these are the organisations that already have all the security programmes and procedures in place,” Lara said.
However, it is likely to be far harder to extend those security measures to the express freight business, where UPS, FedEx, DHL and others gather small quantities of parcels and other freight from the public.