Procedure Recited Is Not Accountability Rendered: CJIAC’s Non-Answer to Zaid Khan

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM  EDITORIAL♦June 20, 2026

Procedure Recited Is Not Accountability Rendered: CJIAC’s Non-Answer to Zaid Khan

Three days of silence ended not with an answer but with a policy memo. CJIAC’s press release confirms a prosthetic should never have been removed — and never once confirms, denies, or investigates whether Zaid Khan’s was.

The Cheddi Jagan International Airport Corporation has finally spoken, three days after Zaid Khan’s account of being ordered to remove his clothing and his prosthetic leg in a side room began circulating widely. What it produced is not a response to Khan. It is a recitation of the National Civil Aviation Security Program, dressed up as one.

Nowhere in CJIAC’s statement does the name Zaid Khan appear. Nowhere does the date June 17 appear. Nowhere is there an acknowledgment that a specific, named traveler made a specific, detailed allegation against specific members of staff.

The corporation answered a question nobody asked — what is the policy — while leaving untouched the question the entire country is asking: what happened to this man, and was it followed.

Read closely, the release is more revealing than its authors likely intended. It states that passengers facing a secondary screening alert must be offered a choice between a private screening room or a secondary screening machine, and it states without qualification that removal of a prosthetic device is never mandatory.

If that is CJIAC’s own standard, then Khan’s account — an officer in a side room instructing him to remove both his pants and his prosthetic — describes conduct that fell outside policy on its face. CJIAC has, in effect, confirmed the violation while declining to confirm that it occurred.

 Just as telling is what the statement asks of the public going forward: passengers with complaints should bring them to the Customer Relations Unit, through a phone line, a WhatsApp number, or an email address. This is the posture of a corporation that has not yet treated Khan’s account as a complaint requiring a response, despite it being public, specific, dated, and amplified for days.

A traveler does not need to refile a grievance the entire country has already read in order for an airport corporation to pull its own security footage from June 17 and look at it.

 The minister with responsibility for civil aviation followed the same script three days on: a statement that walked through existing protocol without engaging the specifics of what Khan says was done to him. Reciting the rules a second time, through a different office, does not multiply into an answer.

It only confirms that the instinct across this administration, when a disabled traveler alleges mistreatment by name, is to point at the manual rather than open the file.

None of this addresses the pattern Khan’s post has already surfaced — other travelers, including Muslim women, describing screening that singled out their attire. CJIAC’s release does not mention that pattern at all, which means it has not yet decided whether June 17 was an isolated lapse or a symptom. The public cannot tell the difference from a press release that never engages the incident in question.

This outfit does not require CJIAC to assume guilt before any review is complete. We require it to do what it told the public it would do: investigate where procedure has been breached, and say so. That means four things, plainly stated, not implied through boilerplate:

 A press release that defines the rules without confirming whether they were broken is not transparency. It is choreography, and the traveling public — along with every investor this country is courting on the strength of its openness — deserves better than a non-answer dressed in institutional language.

We will keep asking until CJIAC, and the ministry standing behind it, answer the question actually in front of them.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board