Rome airport's night-time security flawed

The international terminal at Rome's main airport has no effective security for two hours every night.

ROME, February 5, 2010 (AFP) - The international terminal at Rome's main airport has no effective security for two hours every night, a report in an Italian weekly said on Friday.

L'Espresso said that between 1:00 am and 3:00 am (1200 and 0200 GMT) every day, standard security measures are missing at Fiumicino Airport, which deals with around 33 million passengers a year.

Photos published in the newspaper showed one of its journalists passing through a metal detector and sitting in an office, behind a check-in desk, and at a car rental counter.

"There are security flaws every night: metal detectors are switched off, access doors are unguarded, offices are left open. There is a window of at least two hours during which the secure area of international terminal T3 is accessible to absolutely anyone, in theory even someone with weapons or explosives," the journalist wrote.

"At night the airport belongs to no-one: there are no security staff, no alarms, no-one to guard the place," the newspaper reported, saying the journalist visited the airport shortly after 1:00 am on a Sunday at the end of January.

L'Espresso said the journalist tried again a few days later and found the same situation, with customs offices closed and police on their nighttime break.

The newspaper said the first morning flight left at 5:40 am and normal security controls began at the airport around two hours earlier, but before that the terminal was an "amusement park".

"You can sabotage, damage, steal, connect to the internal computer network, set the moving walkways going ... then at 3:30 am, when Fiumicino starts to wake up, you can get back in your car and drive off, no problem," the journalist wrote.