Whose fault?
The sufferings of two female passengers in Abu Dhabi while flying Etihad Airways was well covered in Bangladesh media. I am not trying to shift blame from those who are responsible, but in the matter of stamping of documents, the airline staff has no involvement and no power. Such stamping are done by airport security staff who are non commercial government agencies (normally police), so it would be simplistic to argue that as it was the duty of the airline staff to stamp the boarding card which they had failed to do, they should take the card back and get it stamped to eliminate the queuing problem. The airline is a commercial firm and its staff tends to commercialize matters such as issuing of tickets and boarding passes but they cannot influence or carry out any security procedure. Most of these checks and stamps are anti-terrorist measures and flying through Indian airports I have felt that the number of checks and stampings (of all baggage tags and boarding passes) are most disconcerting.
I am sure they were detained not by airline staff (who does not have such authority), but by airport security, and it was they who prevented the passengers to continue on their journey or prevent them from contacting their embassies. Hopefully some rescue system would emerge from this incident to help such persons in future.
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