A couple who dumped their baby at the check-in desk in Israel’s Ben Gurion airport before attempting to board a flight to Brussels has been detained by police.
The couple arrived at the airport in Tel Aviv on Tuesday with Belgian passports and tickets for a Ryanair flight to the Belgian capital but didn’t have a boarding pass for their child.
When they were informed by airport staff that they couldn’t board without buying a separate ticket, they just left the child in its pushchair at the check-in desk and proceeded to head for the security terminal.
Startling video footage showed the moment gobsmacked airport staff noticed the lone pushchair and drew back a blanket, exposing the abandoned baby underneath.
In the clip, one member of staff peels back a cover that had been draped over the pushchair, which was sat on a conveyor belt at the check-in desk.
Loud gasps of astonishment were heard when staff discovered a baby had been left unattended in a pushchair with its parents nowhere in sight.
Staff at the security check-in refused to let the pair through, forcing them to return to collect the infant before contacting the police who descended on Terminal 1 and promptly arrested them, and the pair were taken in for questioning.
The manager of the Ryanair desk told the Jerusalem Post that they’d never seen anything like this, and they couldn’t believe what they were witnessing.
According to Ryanair, people travelling with an infant can either pay about £25 for a lap seat or can purchase a separate seat for the child at a standard adult fare.
Israel’s Airport Authority also released a statement, explaining the couple had arrived late for their flight and left the baby at the check-in desk in an attempt to make it through security in time, and said that a couple with Belgian passports arrived for a Ryanair flight at Terminal 1 without a ticket for the baby and that the couple also arrived late for the flight after the flight’s check-in counters had closed.
They left the baby and went to the security check-in at Terminal 1 to get to the departure gate.
A ground services shift manager took the couple back to the flight counters to take the baby and contacted the police and a security guard.
This is dreadful. Was the child being trafficked? And was this child actually their child? Or did they believe that the staff would succumb and let them on with the baby despite the absence of a pass? However, if they came from Belgian, how did they get the baby to Israel in the first place?
Traffickers will frequently dump their product if it doesn’t serve them or if something goes awry, and trafficking is far more common than we believe, and this couple might have been flying on a Belgian passport, but were they actually Belgian-born?
And it seems that this couple didn’t arrive in Israel with the baby to start with, hence why they didn’t need a pass for it, but on the way back out they would have required a pass for the child. Trafficking or a stolen child perhaps? Either way, their plan wasn’t very well thought out.
Humankind never fails to astonish my bewildered soul.
Unfortunately, parents do far worse than this every single day. Procreation doesn’t make awful people suddenly decent human beings sadly, and far too many morons populate this world.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 