600 suffer due to bad weather

V L Srinivasan

Manama, Feb 1:


More than 600 Bahrainis, waiting to board Gulf Air flights from Iraq to Bahrain, were stranded at the Najaf Airport in Iraq for over 26 hours till last night.

Reason: bad weather in Iraq. The two GF planes, which regularly fly from Bahrain to Iraq and back, had taken off from the Bahrain International Airport on time.

However, after reaching the Iraqi air space, the pilot had to return to the Kingdom without landing at Najaf because of unsuitable weather conditions.  The stranded Bahrainis faced a harrowing time in Iraq as they couldn’t find accommodation in any hotels near Najaf Airport. They were forced to spend a night at the airport.

However, Gulf Air did the little it could by providing them blankets, water and other necessary things. “We had been stuck in the Najaf airport for more than 27 hours. Not only were we not informed about the delay, we weren’t even clearly told about other flights. No body even apologised to us,” one of the passengers said.

Another passenger said that they waited for more than a day. “We can understand the weather conditions but we could not understand why nothing was done to help people – most had to sleep on the floor…in the cold,” she said.

The airline staff, however, feels they did whatever they could do to minimise their discomfort. They added that they operated two larger planes — A320 and A321 — to bring all the stranded passengers back to Bahrain.