LONDON—The mass casualties caused by last week’s attacks in Belgium are spurring interest in tools to enable police to spot suicide bombers and other potential attackers from afar—as well as a warning that technology alone isn’t a fail-safe.
The blasts in the departures hall at Brussels Airport, which killed at least 16 people, showed the contrast between the wide-open landside of airports and the tightly secured airside, after passengers and their bags have been screened.
“The aviation-security checkpoint has been under intense scrutiny, it is heavily regulated, it works,” said Matthew Finn, managing director at security consulting firm Augmentiq. “But we still find ourselves with public spaces, such as the check-in area in Brussels, that are vulnerable.”
The European Union’s Committee on Civil Aviation Security called an extraordinary meeting for Thursday to take stock of what happened and exchange information, a spokesman said. “We have to be much better at using technology,” a senior European airport security official said.
Pini Shiff, a former head of security at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport, said airports in Europe and elsewhere are far behind Israel in airport security measures, and that the answer isn’t just more technology.