Washington, April 13: A six-year-old girl in an airport in the United States has been given a full body pat-down by an agent of Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
The girl was with her mother at Louis Armstrong Airport in New Orleans when the TSA agent told the mother that her daughter has to be carefully searched.
A video coverage which hit the internet this weekend shows how the girl tried several times to stop the agent from the body scanning as it was making her very much uncomfortable and confused.
Last November, another video was released of a three-year-old girl patted down by a TSA agent at an airport in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Despite a rising tide of concerns and complaints in the past months over the body scanners, TSA is desperately calling on passengers to go through the faster full body x-ray screening.
According to TSA, some 2,000 complaints have been lodged against the organization from the people who have passed through security checkpoints since the new screening procedures were implemented.
Opponents of the new practice argue that stepping into an x-ray scanner before flights would make flying even more of hassle.
However, the US administration officials claim pat-downs and full-body scanning at airports has been envisaged purely for passengers’ safety in the wake of a number of thwarted bomb plots against US-bound airliners.
About 1,000 full body scanners are expected to be in the US airports by the end of 2011.
——–Agencies