Representational Image. News 18
Beirut: The chairman of Middle East Airlines threatened on Tuesday to call in hunters to shoot seagulls at Beirut International Airport if the Lebanese government did not deal with the issue.
Head of Lebanon’s national airline Mohamad El-Hout said he was giving the government a choice between “allowing the MEA to bring in hunters or allowing the intervention of security forces.”
The number of birds drawn to the nearby Costa Brava landfill site has steadily increased near Rafic Hariri International Airport.
As per the report, the number of seagulls circling the city airport has significantly increased since the waste tip opened in 2016, raising concerns about birds being sucked into aircraft engines, which could cause a plane accident.
El-Hout urged Lebanon’s interior minister to take timely action while warning that if they fail then he would be forced to use the same strategy he had used in 2017.
Reports say that El Hout had hired 125 hunters armed with enough ammunition to kill more than 10,000 seagulls after an MEA flight encountered a flock of birds landed on the airport’s west runway.
Even after that the then-transport minister Youssef Fenianos failed to follow through on a promise to address the issue.
Fenianos had however proposed installing extra devices around the airport to emit bird of prey calls to scare off the gulls, environmentalists had applauded his suggestion, reports say.
In order to completely resolve the bird problem and prevent an “extermination campaign,” activists and environmental organisations have long protested the landfill and urged authorities to shut it down.
“We call for the elimination of the main cause of this crisis, which is the Costa Brava landfill,” You Stink activist Lucien Bourjeily said while reacting to the seagull problem.
Reportedly, the Costa Brava landfill, which was initially established as a stopgap measure after the closure of the primary landfill receiving waste from Beirut, needs to be addressed because seagulls are a species that is protected around the world.
When the environmental committee objected, El-Hout said that “while the passengers’ safety is the priority, I had to choose: Either the seagulls flew, or the MEA.”
MEA recently made headlines due to a number of peculiar occurrences. On Saturday, two of the airline’s planesparked at the airport were hit by stray bullets fired during New Year’s celebrations in Lebanon’s capital.
In a similar incident last November, a stray bullet struck a MEA plane landing in Beirut. There were no casualties reported.
Additionally, in August, two NATO military jets flanked a MEA flight from Madrid to Beirut for a period of time after the pilot, Abed El-Hout, son of the company’s chairman, ignored routine radio calls.
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