Mystery over drone attack as couple are freed
POLICE were last night still hunting for the maniac who brought Gatwick to a halt while admitting there may never have been a drone at all.
The bizarre admission came as a couple arrested on Friday following a tip-off were freed without charge after 36 hours of questioning
Despite 67 “sightings” at the airport last week, when asked whether there may never have been a drone that led to flights being grounded, Det Chief Supt Jason Tingley of Sussex Police said: “Of course, that’s a possibility. We are working with human beings saying they have seen something.
“Until we have got more clarity around what they have said, the detail – the time, place, direction of travel, all those types of things – and that’s a big task.”
The closure led to the grounding of 1,000 flights which ruined the Christmas travel plans of 140,000 passengers. But Mr Tingley insisted: “We are not back to square one. Whilst these two people have been in custody, we have a number of lines of inquiry and persons of interest.”
He also confirmed that a damaged drone found near the airport in Horley and possibly brought down by the military is undergoing forensic
tests. He said one of the “working theories” was that it was responsible for the disruption.
Other lines of inquiry include a disgruntled airport employee or environmental activists.
Police have so far played down terrorism or state-sponsored hybrid warfare. But the search for the drone operators suffered a setback when former soldier and window fitter Paul Gait, 47, and his wife Elaine Kirk-Gait, 54, were released yesterday.
They were interrogated for hours and their home in a quiet cul-de-sac in Crawley near the airport thoroughly searched after police swooped.
DCS Tingley said: “Both people have fully co-operated and I am satisfied that they are no longer suspects in the drone incidents at Gatwick.”
Police insisted the arrests had been lawful but Mr Gait’s boss John Allard said he had been working at the times the drones were flying.
He rang the police but had to leave a message and no one called back.
Mr Allard, from Crowborough, East Sussex, said: “The police could have handled it better just by asking the who, when and where. The police have handled this absolutely appallingly.”
Mr Gait’s ex-wife, Gemma Allard, 40, also confirmed his whereabouts at the height of the crisis on Thursday.
She said: “Two employees are able to vouch for him and they have done. I was the main witness because I was with him in the morning.” As flights returned to normal, Gatwick airport offered a £50,000 reward through Crimestoppers to help catch the rogue operators who grounded flights on Wednesday night and all day Thursday. Transport Secretary Chris Grayling came under fire for failing to act more swiftly, while Labour called for an independent inquiry.
RAF experts with drone-hunters capable of bringing down the craft by jamming the wavelengths used by drone controllers are still at Gatwick and similar teams have been deployed to other airports around the country.
In the wake of the attack, police at Britain’s biggest airports are set to be armed with drone-killing bazookas.
Met Police at Heathrow are testing the weapons which fire a mortar-like projectile containing a net to snare a flying drone within 130 yards. Senior government figures will approve the use of military warfare technologies in a bid to stop copycat attacks.
THE first duty of any government is to defend the nation. But our present fumbling officialdom fails miserably in that task, as the Gatwick drone fiasco has illustrated. Amid scenes of national embarrassment, our secondbusiest airport was effectively paralysed for 36 hours by nothing more than a flying toy. As the authorities stood by impotently in the face of a tiny mechanised menace, more than 140,000 passengers had their travel plans disrupted at this special time of the year.
It was a saga of institutional folly, organised cowardice and spectacular ineptitude. Gatwick and Whitehall had been warned about the dangers of drones, yet for months chose to do nothing beyond the erection of a few ineffectual signs.
Moreover, as last week’s crisis escalated, Whitehall pathetically hesitated to call in the military, even though personnel from the RAF and the Signals Regiment were on standby with anti-drone technology.
It was 19 hours after the first sighting that the request for assistance was finally made, a delay which has been described as “madness” by one insider. Even now, the incompetence continues. Yesterday, the police were forced to release their prime suspects, Paul Gait and his wife Elaine Kirk, without any charges.
Throughout the shambles, ministers failed to get a grip on the situation. The same politicians who like to pontificate about Britain’s global influence could not even take the simple decisions that would have secured civilian airspace. They boast of our international reach, but they preside over worsening domestic vulnerability.
The same is true of the sea. Britain was once the world’s greatest maritime power, yet today our own territorial waters are no longer safe. At the same time as the Gatwick farce unfolded, an Italian cargo ship, sailing from Nigeria, was hijacked in the Thames Estuary by a gang of stowaways who armed themselves with metal bars, then threatened the crew with as they demanded that the vessel sail close to the coast so they could swim ashore.
Fortunately, their act of blatant piracy was foiled when commandos from the Royal Navy’s Special Boat Service stormed the ship, freeing the crew and capturing the hostage-takers. But, for all the SBS’s success, the incident illustrates how our country is now regarded as a soft touch, a view that will no doubt be reinforced when the criminals are given legal aid, let off by the courts and granted permanent leave to remain here on “human rights” grounds.
That is precisely what happened in 2000 when a group of Afghans hijacked a plane and forced it to land at Stansted airport. Despite the seriousness of their crime, they were allowed by judges to settle in Britain.
During the Brexit debate about Northern Ireland, the Government trumpeted its determination to uphold “the integrity of the United Kingdom”, yet there is not the slightest sign of any willingness to maintain properly the UK’s borders.
On the contrary, any sense of rigour has collapsed, with over 600,000 arrivals coming every year, the majority of them from outside the European Union.
Ministers wail about the continuing threats of extremism and terrorism in our midst but they are the ones who deliberately encouraged the import of these problems through their refusal to impose effective controls.
What we now have at the heart of our ruling elite is posturing ambition abroad and practical feebleness at home.
Last week, in a typically vainglorious move, Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson declared the Royal Navy is to send its warship HMS Echo to the Black Sea, in a show of solidarity with Ukraine in defiance of Russia. “The pressure needs to be put on President Putin,” said Williamson.
But Putin is unlikely to be intimidated by a British Cabinet that can be immobilized by a drone. In any case, the Government would do far better to concentrate on the protection of Britain instead of sabrerattling against Russia.
As this paper reported exclusively last month, our own national Border Force has just two vessels to patrol nearly 8,000 miles of coastline, despite the phenomenal recent growth in migration.
By contrast, Italy, with 4,500 miles of coast, has 600 boats for border enforcement.
The warped political priorities are glaring. We have a measly pair of patrol boats, but two gigantic aircraft carriers, together costing £7billion, which are useless in any form of home defence and swallow vast naval resources in their own protection.
NOT content with this extravagance, defence minister Tobias Ellwood wants his department’s budget to rise by another £8billion a year, up from the current £36billion, so that we can “play an influential role on the international stage as a force for good”, as he wrote last week.
With the same deluded, messianic fervour, the Government recently announced that it is to double the number of British troops in Afghanistan to 1,000, while the Ministry of Defence sanctimoniously asserts that Britain will not be following Donald Trump’s example of a military withdrawal from Syria.
But there is not the slightest justification for any of this. Our recent military interventions in the Middle East and Asia have all been disastrous.
Grotesquely, our politicians’ eagerness for regime change in Syria led to support for the very jihadis we now claim to be fighting. Our Government should stop posing as the world’s policeman, and start providing proper security in our own country.
‘A flying toy has been allowed to cause chaos’