A 30-year-old Indian woman was allegedly asked to remove her clothes by Frankfurt airport security officers as part of a ‘random security check’ while she was on her way from Bangalore to Iceland via Germany with her family.
Shruthi Basappa said she was the only person pulled aside for the strip search, and termed it a case of racial profiling. The Indian passport holder with Icelandic residence permit, was travelling with her Icelandic husband and her four-year-old daughter when the incident took place.
Hearing of the incident, Indian Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj has asked for a report on the incident from the Consulate General in Frankfurt.
Raveesh - Plz send me a report on this. @CGIFrankfurt https://t.co/Aa2iljmsIG
— Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) April 1, 2017
As claimed by her in a Facebook post (which now appears to have been either taken down or made private), she was travelling to Iceland from India, via Frankfurt, when she was asked to move aside for the ‘random check’ and with no other explanations offered.
“I was taken into a room, and was asked to lift my dress/ take it off so that I could be checked to make sure I wasn’t ‘carrying anything under my clothes’. This whole ordeal happened in front of my 4-year-old,” Shruthi said in the post.
“I was given no explanation as to why I was put through this ordeal. My constant requests to be patted down gently because of a recent abdominal surgery (proof of which I was carrying on hand) was constantly ignored and resulted in being shouted at aggressively by the woman in charge. She then proceeded to call her supervisor who parroted the same lines about how they wanted me to take my dress off.”
While a verified account of Frankfurt airport responded to Shruthi’s post on Facebook stating that forcing to strip is not ‘standard protocol’, they haven’t yet taken any action.
Speaking to NDTV, Shruthi said she has a filed a complaint but there hasn’t been any response yet.