A 5-year-old pet cat, Freida, who went missing at the Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru on November 23 has been found after ten days of rigorous search. Her parents, Howard James-Scott and Paula, will soon be returning to India to take their cat back home to Portugal. Freida was found as a result of a joint search by nearly 20 volunteers and officers from the Central Industrial Security Force (CISF).
Kelly Johnson, a local pet shelter owner, was taking three of the couple’s pets, two dogs Zoeybee and Simba, and Freida to Madrid via Doha when the cat went missing. Freida was spotted in CCTV footage roaming around one of the VIP lounges at the airport and had been later found hiding under a staircase of the lounge by CISF officers. “We are very overwhelmed to have found Freida and grateful that she was safe these past 10 days. She is very scared and is running a fever because of stress but other than that she is healthy,” Kelly said.
Freida was set to fly to Madrid in the early hours of November 23 on a Qatar Airways flight to be reunited with her parents. The pet parents had blamed the airline's ground staff for allegedly failing to secure the cage following security clearance and before boarding it onto the cargo belly of the aircraft. Kelly had completed security and animal safety procedures and handed over the pets scheduled to board the Qatar Airways flight to Doha’s ground staff. Just before Kelly was boarding the flight, she was informed that the cat had gone missing from her cage which was sealed.
Howard and Paula lived in Bengaluru for 15 years before relocating to Portugal in September. "We rescued Freida as a kitten after she fell off a tall building in Kadubeesanahalli and suffered life-threatening injuries. We were waiting to reunite with Freida, Zoeybee and Simba after two months but this shocking episode of our cat going missing from an extremely secure facility like the airport has left us heartbroken,” Howard had said while speaking to Times of India when the cat initially went missing.