U.S. and UK puts restrictions on carrying electronic from 10 airports.

Due to threats the American and British intelligence has been following up, the two governments has put restrictions on electronics from 10 different airports, in the middle-east and North African countries. This is due to reports that militant groups in those countries want to smuggle explosive devices hidden in electronics gadgets.

The Department of Homeland Security said passengers traveling from those airports could not bring devices larger than a cellphone, such as tablets, portable DVD players, laptops and cameras, into the main cabin. Instead, they must be stored in the checked baggage.

The airports where the restrictions take place are Cairo; Istanbul; Kuwait City; Doha, Qatar; Casablanca, Morocco; Amman, Jordan; Riyadh and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and Dubai and Abu Dhabi in United Arab Emirates.

Now what does that mean for the airlines? It means that several of the airlines, including Turkish Airlines, Etihad and Qatar, said early on Tuesday that they were quickly moving to comply. Royal Jordanian and Saudi Airlines said on Monday that they were immediately putting the directive into place.

All this is due to attacks which  happened on several different occasions, such as the one in Yemen, AQAP, where in 2015 it took responsibility for the attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine offices in Paris, or the same group taking responsibility for a failed attempt by a Nigerian Islamist to put down an airliner over Detroit. The device of that man, which was located in the man’s underwear, failed to detonate, thankfully. Also, in 2010, security officials in Britain and Dubai intercepted parcel bombs sent from Yemen to the United States.

According to the Trump administration this is nothing to do with the Muslim ban, but it is because the Department of Homeland Security has multiple reports that radical Islamist groups want to bring those devices on board and use them as explosives.

This is a step to increase security on the airline carriers that come from the Muslim countries as well as passengers with connecting in the airports of those countries, or people flying in from those specific countries and boarding other airlines’ planes in connecting flights in other airports of the world, all with a final destination to the US and UK.

What are your thoughts about this step? Do you think that it was necessary in order to prevent any further attacks? Who will suffer in the end? The passengers or the airline companies of those countries?


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