Dud security cameras installed at Calcutta airport’s international terminal have been recording little more than images of people’s feet, the walls and ceilings for over six months without officials once monitoring the footage, a probe has revealed.

The failure of most of the 25 CCTV cameras to record proper footage came to light when officials probing last Friday’s bribe-and-assault complaint against immigration officials scanned some of the tapes.

“We were shocked to find images of people’s feet along with walls and ceilings. If the focusing was bad in some cameras, others had the wrong angle of view,” said an official who did not wish to be named.

Most of the CCTV cameras apparently do not conform to the specifications laid down by the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security more than two years ago.

“These cameras are not even digital. The Bureau of Civil Aviation Security had specified in the wake of a terror alert that all cameras at airports should be upgraded,” said a security officer,

Modern CCTV cameras designed for high-security zones like airports rotate at regular intervals, recording footage from various angles.

Not only are the cameras at the international terminal outmoded, several “key operational areas” are not even under camera surveillance.

“The area where registered luggage is scanned is not within CCTV range. There is only one camera in the area where loaders sort out registered luggage before they are put on flights. The image quality of this camera is poor and it has a fixed angle of view,” the officer said.

A fixed angle means that a person trying to tamper with luggage needs to only take a few steps to shift out of the camera’s range. Several such incidents have been reported at the international terminal over the past year.

On Friday, flier Prabhat Kumar Singh was allegedly assaulted and locked up by immigration officials after he refused to pay a bribe of Rs 200 for travelling on a “damaged passport”.

The assault took place when Singh, a resident of Bihar, was returning from Bangladesh.

Three immigration personnel have been placed under suspension but officials say that the case against them would have become much stronger had the CCTVs placed in the immigration area recorded proper footage.

The failure of the CCTV surveillance at the international terminal — the domestic terminal ostensibly has better cameras — is the latest blot on the airport, which has become a source of embarrassment for the city.

Metro has been regularly highlighting the woes of fliers facing inconvenience at every step, from the point of entry till the exit door.

Airport officials claimed that the old CCTV cameras hadn’t been replaced yet because the current international terminal would be shut once the under-construction integrated terminal was commissioned. “The integrated terminal will have Internet protocol cameras, which can be centrally controlled,” an official said.

Till such time, all that fliers can do is hope that the cameras at the international terminal point in the right direction.