An Air India staffer has been suspended after an investigation found the employee responsible for incorrectly handling three Italian nationals who arrived in Delhi on a domestic flight from Amritsar and subsequently flew to Munich without undergoing mandatory departure immigration, Civil Aviation Minister K Ram Mohan Naidu said on Tuesday.The action marks the first personnel-level fallout of the security breach and comes as the government widens its scrutiny beyond individual responsibility to examine gaps across the passenger-transfer system.Naidu said the Air India employee assigned to escort passengers through designated airport pathways failed to follow prescribed procedures and was suspended immediately after the investigation fixed responsibility.The Civil Aviation Ministry has also held a meeting with Air India and reviewed the entire passenger journey, from issuance of boarding passes and segregation of travellers to their routing and physical movement at the connecting airport.The role of DigiYatra is also being examined. The government is now looking at multiple layers of checks so that failure at one stage does not allow a passenger to bypass immigration. Closer verification of boarding-pass indicators and additional physical checks by ground personnel at transfer points are among the measures under consideration.The breach occurred in the early hours of September 4 when the three Italian nationals arrived at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport at 12.50 am on Air India flight AI1115 from Amritsar.They were travelling on “D”, or domestic, boarding passes for the Amritsar-Delhi sector and were required to exit through designated Gate 39, complete departure immigration and then proceed for their onward international journey. Instead, they were incorrectly escorted to the International-to-International transfer area. From there, they reached the departure zone and boarded Lufthansa flight LH763 for Munich at 1.45 am, less than an hour after landing in Delhi — without immigration clearance.The Civil Aviation Ministry subsequently issued a show-cause notice to Air India, terming it a “serious security and immigration-related lapse” and flagging alleged violations of the approved hub-and-spoke Standard Operating Procedure.The ministry had also questioned how passengers carrying domestic boarding passes were allowed into the international transfer area and why the prescribed segregation mechanism failed.