7-year-old girl takes train to Geneva airport and boards plane without ticket

In a surprising incident, a seven-year-old girl managed to run away from her parents near Geneva's central railway station on 29 October and successfully took the one-stop ride to the city's airport and board a plane without having a ticket.

According to a Reuters report, the girl's parents informed the Swiss police and the authorities tracked her progress through the airport on security videos.

The airport in their statement said that the girl went through the security gate and managed to pass herself off as the child of adults around her.

She used her small stature to slip through the departure gate without being noticed and is said to have boarded a plane.

Airport spokesman Bertrand Staempfli said the surveillance videos showed that the girl was not asked for her boarding pass.

Staempfli said: "She apparently managed to make out she was with the adults in front or behind her."

The spokesman added that the when the girl first tried to board the plane, she followed a crew but they turned her back. However, she eventually managed to board the plane by avoiding the usual channels and sneaking in "through a passage only accessible to a child of that size," Staempfli said.

After she was spotted by an official, she was handed over to the police. She is said to have spent around 32 minutes in the passenger and aeroplane area.

"It's not about pointing the finger at one person or another in this story," Staempfli said. "We must take collective responsibility."

Staempfli, however, did not say which airline was involved nor did he mention where it was flying to, Reuters reported.

The spokesman also said that steps are being taken to ensure that such an incident does not occur again.

"We must acknowledge that the current system is efficient for adults and accompanied children but that it must take better account of the weaknesses that could let a child slip through, as this unprecedented and regrettable incident has shown," Staempfli said.

"This should never have happened," Staempfli added.