Questions are being asked about management at Medan’s Kualanamu Airport after it took three days to locate the body of a woman who had previously fallen through an elevator gap.
Aisiah, 38, was found dead in the pit below an elevator at the airport on April 27. On April 24, she had gone to Kualanamu to drop off a relative before her family suddenly lost contact with her.
After three days of searching, Kualanamu staff eventually found Aisiah after they smelled the stench from her decomposing body emanating from the elevator.
Aisiah’s family blasted airport management for not reviewing CCTV footage from the elevator – her last known location.
Indeed, the footage, which later leaked to the public, shows Aisiah entering the two-door elevator on her own. When she arrived at the second floor, she failed to notice that the door behind her opened before it shut again.
Aisiah looked like she thought she was stuck in the elevator when she dialed her relative for assistance. She then pried the wrong door open – which did not appear to give much resistance – and stepped out of the elevator before falling through a gap between the carriage and the glass wall.
Warning: The video below depicts the victim’s final moments
It’s likely that Aisiah died from the two-storey drop and not from being crushed by the car of the elevator, as there is a buffer zone between it and the bottom of the pit.
Kualanamu authorities said that no one was monitoring the CCTV monitors at the time of the incident. Meanwhile, Aisiah’s family alleged that the airport refused to check CCTV footage from the elevator on April 24 as they received no reports of malfunction that day.
“This is an international-level airport. How are safety standards like this? And the response from the staff [to the family’s request for help finding Aisiah] was very, very unsatisfactory,” Aisiah’s brother, Raja Hasibuan, said.
Police have launched an investigation and begun questioning witnesses for this case.
The North Sumatra Ombudsman office has criticized airport authorities for neglect, particularly related to how Aisiah was able to open the wrong elevator door, and the airport’s slow response to her family’s plea for help.
