In the last two months, the airport has seen three incidents where unauthorised persons have been spotted roaming around the runway. The latest incident was reported early on Sunday when a 16-year-old was found near a Spicejet aircraft.

Around 12.30 am, the technical staff of the Spicejet plane found a 16-year-old boy hiding inside the “valley” of the aircraft’s wheel. CISF officers interrogated the boy, a resident of Palam village, for more than two hours. “He seems to be mentally challenged,” said an officer.

The boy entered the airport after scaling the perimeter wall near the construction site of terminal-3. For the next two hours, he roamed around unnoticed, till the Spicejet staff spotted him. Senior CISF officers said there are very few lights on the perimeter wall and that they have repeatedly written to DIAL about installing lights in the area.

“The boy said he wanted to go to Dubai and someone had misguided him saying he should sit near the airplane wheel and try and sneak into the cargo compartment of the aircraft,” said a senior Spicejet official. The CISF has handed over the boy to the Delhi Police. The Palam police have registered a case against him.

It is, however, not a one-off incident. On February 14, an 18-year-old boy was found loitering around the hangar of Aviation Research Centre, one of the most sensitive areas of the airport where aircraft on which latest research is being conducted are parked. Coming under the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), it is one of the five centres in India responsible for aerial surveillance.

The area is guarded by the Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB). At 11 pm, SSB officer Anuj Sirohi spotted Rakesh Kumar Dhaiya roaming around the hangar. On frisking, he found a temporary pass (000001359) issued to one Sonu Kumar Dhaiya who worked with Go Air as a loader from his possession. SSB officers handed over Dhaiya to the CISF. Officers from both the CISF and the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security interrogated him for more than two days. But they still do not know how Dhaiya managed to enter the airport.

Dhaiya told the interrogators that he had been roaming around the airport for more than two hours. He was handed over to the Delhi Police on February 16 and a case of trespassing registered. According to the police, he is also mentally unstable and had accidentally strayed into the sensitive area.

The third incident is of even more serious nature. A man in his early thirties, Ram Lal was found standing in front of the nose of a chartered aircraft that was scheduled to fly a VIP on January 18 this year. The aircraft was parked in an area earmarked for the Air Force. Lal was spotted just minutes before the VIP was supposed to arrive. The warrant officer of Air Force, Niranjan Tripathy, who was in charge of seeing off the VIP, spotted him.