I know the chief pilot quite well and while I haven't spoken to him about this I understand they always fly with an engineer so it is likely that it was inspected.
If I read this right and based on the FlightGlobal Blog. From the first post here .. Rear stairs - wrong, aborted take off with stairs extended - wrong, 120 pax -wrong. Got to love the press ..great theatre. You have to wonder what else is wrong.
At its core this is clearly not something that should have happened.
Interesting in that it does show that you really have to be careful with what people witness and then say they saw and what they actually do see in the stress of the moment. This is of course giving the journalist no credit for poetic licence!!