Italy:Italian transport minister Alessandro Bianchi has summoned representatives of Italy's Civil Aviation Authority (ENAC) and of Rome's Fiumicino airport for an emergency meeting this morning to address allegations of sabotage in the handling of luggage at the airport.
Government offices and consumer associations have received thousands of complaints from travellers who, at best, have waited up to an hour and a half to reclaim their luggage or, at worst, have not found their bags at all.
The consumer group Telefono Blu Consumatori claims that more than 10,000 items of luggage have gone missing in recent days, even though it acknowledges that nearly all of these will eventually be delivered to their owners. Both arriving and departing passengers have been affected.
The situation has clearly been aggravated by the fact that this is one of the busiest weeks in the year for Fiumicino, with an estimated 100,000 travellers passing through daily.
On Sunday, ENAC president Vito Riggio prompted consternation when he accused handlers of deliberately sabotaging baggage operations so that the handling companies would be forced to operate overtime in order to clear the huge volume of accumulated luggage.
Chewing gum placed over automatic camera lenses and suitcases awkwardly loaded have allegedly caused Fiumicino's luggage ramp to repeatedly break down.
In an attempt to get to the bottom of the problem, ENAC carried out a series of spot-checks at the airport yesterday: "You simply cannot exclude the possibility that there are one or two rotten apples among those workers who load and unload bags at Fiumicino and they have to be identified and isolated out of respect for the majority of the workers at the airport who at the moment are often seasonal workers, with a very heavy workload.
"Frankly, I cannot deny the possibility that some people have tried to deliberately slow up the system. If that's the case, then we are talking about criminal behaviour and it should be dealt with as such", said Mr Riggio yesterday.
Four handling companies - AZ Handling, Flight Care Italia, EAS and Avia Partner - are currently in the eye of the storm.
However, trade unionist Walter Mancini, national co-ordinator for the handlers' union, the SDL, yesterday defended his members, arguing that the basic problem was that staffing levels were too low to handle the high season volume of luggage at the airport.