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Hajj pilgrims witnessed utter mismanagement by the Biman Bangladesh Airlines and the Civil Aviation Authority of Bangladesh (CAAB) yesterday. In the meantime a pilgrim, whose flight had been delayed, died at the airport.
Biman said hajj pilgrim Sujat Ali, 55, died of a heart attack. Other pilgrims, who were scheduled to fly with him, said the elderly man fell sick while waiting anxiously in Zia International Airport (ZIA) to catch his rescheduled flight.
Sources at ZIA said five hajj flights of Biman were cancelled between Sunday night and yesterday evening causing a pandemonium in the airport as Biman employees were scrambling to reschedule the flights of several hundred stranded pilgrims.
Protesting the mismanagement and cancellation of flights, a few hundred pilgrims demonstrated at the airport several times between Sunday night and yesterday noon.
A Biman press release said Sujat died at about 1:30am yesterday.
Having passport No. 031164, he hailed from Sreepur village under Kotwali police station in Pabna.
Airport sources said he was scheduled to board the 576-seater chartered flight BG-801, which had been scheduled to take off at 5.45pm Sunday but it was delayed and rescheduled to depart at 7.00pm due to not having landing permission in Jeddah from the Saudi authorities. Finally the flight was cancelled altogether sparking anger among the waiting pilgrims.
CAAB officials neither allowed the journalists to enter inside to talk to the distressed pilgrims, nor did they allow the pilgrims to come out to talk to the journalists.
However, duty controller of Biman told The Daily Star yesterday that the BG-801 flight would take off from ZIA at 8:00pm yesterday as they secured the landing permission from the Saudi government in the afternoon.
BIMAN STATEMENT
Biman authorities in a press release yesterday said they had sent the 'ballottee' (under government management) hajj pilgrims of Sunday's cancelled flight BG-103 to Jeddah by BG-801 flight last night while the 'non-ballottee' (under private management) pilgrims were sent by flight BG-105 the same night.
The release claimed that Biman arranged hotel accommodations for the pilgrims whose flights had been cancelled, but Sujat Ali and many others did not prefer to go out of the airport.
Sujat Ali died of a cardiac arrest at the airport at about 1:30am while asleep, the release said.
The body of Sujat was sent to his village home through his relatives in a Biman vehicle yesterday.
The first Hajj flight of Biman took off from ZIA on Sunday morning with 274 'ballottee' pilgrims out of 2,621 of them.
The press release also said this year 45,000 people will go to Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj and five to six thousand of them will be ferried by foreign airlines.
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