Journalist who exposed security risk is fined

Investigative journalist Alberto Stegeman was fined €1,500 by a court in Haarlem on Thursday for infiltrating security at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport while working for the tv programme Undercover in Nederland.

With the assistance of an KLM employee, who has also been fined and has since been sacked, Stegeman was able to access a restricted area and get close to a plane used by the royal family and government ministers.
A colleague of Stegeman, who worked on the same tv show, was given a €1,000 fine.
In a reaction to the court ruling, Stegeman said he had been acting in the public interest and will not pay the fine, reports ANP news service.
‘I am not going to be gagged by Schiphol,’ he is quoted as saying. He points out that Schiphol tightened its security procedures following the broadcast of the SBS programme in December 2008.
This was not the first time Stegeman has exposed weaknesses in the airport’s security measures. On an earlier occasion he managed to place a false bomb in the cargo hold of a passenger plane but the prosecution department decided not to take him to court because his action was considered to be in the public interest.