Frantic in Frankfurt

Arriving on a flight from Manila at the Frankfurt airport in Germany, my friend Paulino Y. Tan (President of Asia Pacific College, board member of the Foundation for Upgrading the Standard of Education or FUSE, and adviser of the Congressional Committee on Science, Technology, and Engineering or COMSTE, among other distinguished titles) had his laptop bag snatched by a person unknown right inside the airport. Inside the bag were not only his laptop and his wallet, but his passport (with the highly important Schengen visa that he needed to enter other European countries).

Tan travels overseas almost every month either for business or pleasure (or both at the same time). He is about as experienced a traveler as anyone can get. He never had his pocket picked nor his luggage stolen – until Frankfurt.

I tell this story because it has good, not bad news.

Tan reported the theft immediately to the German police. The German police went into action.

I thought of two hopeful scenarios.

First, since there are cameras everywhere in the Frankfurt airport, whoever grabbed the bag must have been caught on videotape. It would have been a fairly simple matter for one of the most sophisticated police forces in the world to identify the thief and look for him or her in a city with less than a million inhabitants.

My other hope was that the bag, emptied of cash and credit cards, would be immediately thrown away by the thief, who might not want to be seen with it. It would then be seen somewhere in the airport by someone who would then undoubtedly report it to the police as unclaimed. In Germany, as in many other countries, a bag just lying around, especially in an airport, is always suspected of containing a bomb. The police would then recognize the unknown bag as the bag they were looking for.

In either case, I was betting on the famous efficiency of the German police. After all, even an isolated incident of bag snatching at the airport would have dented Germany’s image as a top tourist destination.

As it turned out, both my scenarios were wrong, at least partly. The thief threw the bag into a trash can. The bag eventually ended up in a garbage dump where someone noticed it and notified the police. The police quickly identified the bag as the one Tan lost.

In less than 12 hours, the police were able to return Tan’s bag to him, with the passport, the laptop, and the credit cards, though without his money, camera, and watch.

The lessons for our own police are clear. First, thefts of tourist property should be considered top priority; otherwise, the country loses tourists. Second, citizens should not be afraid, and in fact should be eager, to report found items to the police. (In our country, most honest cab drivers go to radio stations instead. You can draw your own conclusions about what that shows about public trust in our police force.)

When the police retrieved the bag, they returned it themselves to Tan at his hotel. I have nothing but praise for the German police.

I also have nothing but praise for our foreign service. Also doing their jobs very well were our own diplomatic officers in Germany.

During the 12-hour interval between the theft and the retrieval, we asked for the help of our embassy in Berlin to prepare a new passport and to facilitate the issuance of another visa. It was a Saturday, not a working day, but the embassy had a duty officer on call. The duty officer promptly responded to our text message.

One phone call led to another, and within an hour, the embassy personnel had moved. They did two things: first, even if it was not a working day, they set in motion their passport replacement process, and second, they started the process of securing a new Schengen visa for Tan.

Meanwhile, to cover all the bases, we texted FUSE and COMSTE head Senator Edgardo J. Angara about the bag-snatching. Within an hour, the aides of Senator Angara were in contact with the Philippine embassy in Berlin and the consulate in Frankfurt. They were able to arrange for Tan to talk to various diplomatic officers, who needed more details about the incident.

We sometimes hear unflattering things about our foreign service, but in my own experience with them (not just during the bag-snatching in Frankfurt), I have always found our foreign service officers (diplomats and staff) to be remarkably courteous and efficient. I do a lot of training of DFA personnel at the Foreign Service Institute and have even been an examiner a couple of times for the foreign service examinations, and I am always impressed by the people at DFA.

For their quick action during Tan’s mini-crisis, the following deserve special commendation, because they personally helped in assuring Tan of a new passport and a new visa (even if, as it eventually turned out, the German police made the arrangements unnecessary): Consul General Maria Cleofe R. Natividad, Consul Julius Caesar Flores, and Rosemarie Ramos (secretary of Ambassador Delia Domingo-Albert, who was in Manila at that time) of the embassy in Berlin; Honorary Consul Donna Ledda Hess, Consul Romeo Manalo, and Consul Raul M. Santiago Jr. of the consulate in Frankfurt.