14 DAY TRIAL // Towards the end of last week, a woman named Diana Tolstova was killed by an airport security scanner in the city of Ulan-Ude in Russia. No, the scanner did not accidentally collapse on top of her or anything of the sorts.
On the contrary, the woman simply passed through it just like any other passenger. However, just minutes after she had her entire body checked to make sure that she wasn't planning a hostile takeover of the airport, she collapsed.
According to her husband, who was by her side when she started feeling ill, the security scanner first caused the woman to experience dizziness. Minutes later, her condition took a turn from bad to worse, and she passed away.
“When we got to the departure gate she began to feel dizzy and suddenly collapsed. I grabbed her in my arms and called for medical help,” the 30-year-old woman's husband told the press in an interview, as cited by International Business Times.
How can a security scanner kill anybody?
It is understood that, quite a while ago, 30-year-old Diana Tolstova was fitted with a pacemaker. As explained by specialists, it is possible for airport security scanners to interfere with such devices and cause them to malfunction.
By the looks of it, this is precisely what happened to Maxim Tolstova's wife. Thus, the scanner most likely toyed with her pacemaker. This translated into the woman experiencing an irregular heartbeat and eventually dying.
Her husband claims that, had anyone jumped to her rescue, his 30-year-old wife might still be alive today. Still, it looks like nobody at the airport where this incident occurred bothered to give her first aid or call an ambulance before it was too late.
Whose fault was it?
As far as the victim's husband is concerned, staff at the airport are the ones to blame for the fact that his wife is now dead. Thus, he says that, despite presenting documentation that Diana Tolstova had a pacemaker inside her, she was nonetheless made to go through the security scanner.
Airport authorities, on the other hand, maintain that the woman and her husband got confused and that the 30-year-old passed through the scanner on her own accord after failing to alert staff that she wasn't supposed to do so.
“In normal circumstances, they see their papers and let them pass. In this case, the patient seems to either have forgotten about it, didn't know or became confused by the airport security arrangements,” reads a statement issued by the airport's operators.
Whatever the reason, the fact remains that people wearing pacemakers must never go through a metal detector such as the security scanners used at airports and other similar facilities. Otherwise, they risk having the device malfunction and kill them.
