Man on the runway, flights stopped for an hour at Malpensa

Malpensa Airport was paralysed for more than an hour; no plane was able to depart, and in-coming planes had to be diverted to other airports. From 7 p.m. on Tuesday, 15 January, the airport was disrupted by a man running onto the runway.

The man was a 30-year-old Egyptian who had boarded an Air Italy flight to Dakar, to be returned to Senegal. He had entered through the front door of the plane, walked along the entire corridor, and on reaching the rear door, leapt onto the runway, grasping the opportunity when the operators were moving the steps away and the door was still open.

According to the news agency ANSA, the man had arrived in Malpensa on Sunday, from Dakar, and was to continue on to Cairo. While he was in transit, however, he was stopped by police officers at Malpensa, who decided to return him to the border, which they did today, on the first possible flight. Thus, they had concluded that he was not an asylum seeker.

On Tuesday evening, after his escape, all of runways were immediately closed, with flights blocked for an hour. A total of 15 flights were diverted to Linate, Turin, Bergamo, Venice and Zurich, and no planes were allowed to take off. This is the arrivals board at the airport, and, at the time, the man was still on the run.

At 8.20 p.m., the National Air Traffic Services and the Civil Aviation Authority decided to reopen runway 35L, but as the fugitive had not been identified yet, the links to the runways were manned by Public Security teams and by Airport Authority employees. Shortly before 11 p.m., the other runway also returned to normal operation.

In the middle of the night, the man was tracked down by the carabinieri, in Samarate. He is not injured and in the next few hours he will be expelled from Italy.

Expulsions at the border, by administrative means, are frequent (and often communicated by the police themselves). In some cases they have been legally challenged, as in the case of two women already resident in Italy, who were refused entry on their return to Malpensa.