200 Kingfisher Airlines engineers strike work

Around 200 engineers of the crisis-hit Kingfisher Airlines struck work on Saturday protesting non-payment of salaries despite the airline's earlier claim that all the staff had been paid. "Some 200 engineers went on strike work today (Saturday) as they have still not been paid their

salaries," airline officials said in Mumbai.

The engineers belongs to both management and non-management cadre, they said.

"The non-payment apparently could be because of some technical glitch. We are trying to figure out whether the problem of clearance of salaries is from the airline's system or some back-end problem of the banks," they said.

The strike has, however, not affected Kingfisher's flight operations, the officials said.

Kingfisher Airlines had on April 9 said that it had paid December salary to all its staff. "In fact, we paid the salaries of all employees on April 4 itself," it had said.

Airline's Chairman Vijay Mallya had then assured his employees that their salaries would be disbursed in a staggered manner from April 4 to 10.

The airline, which has salary accounts in HDFC Bank, Axis Bank and ICICI, has been operating a scaled down flight schedule of about 100 services each day.