Holiday camp organisers are to file a legal complaint against Spanish airline Vueling over a decision a day earlier to make French Jewish teenagers disembark from a Paris-bound flight, a lawyer said on Thursday.
“We are going to file a complaint for physical and psychological violence, as well as discrimination on the basis of religion,” Club Kineret’s lawyer Julie Jacob said, adding that those involved were mostly under 15 years old.
The airline said it had asked the children to leave the Paris-bound plane in the Spanish city of Valencia due to their “disruptive behaviour”, but parents condemned what some of them described as an “antisemitic act”.
In a statement, Vueling said some passengers “engaged in highly disruptive behaviour and adopted a very confrontational attitude, putting at risk the safe conduct” the flight to Paris-Orly airport.
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“We categorically deny any suggestion that our crew’s decision related to the religion of the passengers involved. This decision was taken solely to ensure the safety of all passengers,” it said.
“This group mishandled emergency equipment and actively disrupted the mandatory safety demonstration, repeatedly ignoring instructions from cabin crew,” Vueling added.
The crew requested the intervention of the Civil Guard police force, which “decided to disembark the group to prioritise the safety of the rest of the passengers”, Vueling said.
“Once at the terminal, the group’s behaviour continued to be aggressive. Some individuals displayed a violent attitude,” leading to the arrest of one person, Vueling said.
The Civil Guard corroborated Vueling’s statement about a group of 47 minors and their four supervisors, saying the arrested person “refused to get off the plane and obey the officers” but was later released.
Parents said the teenagers were forced off the plane after one of them had sung a song in Hebrew.
A mother whose 17-year-old son was on the flight told AFP on condition of anonymity that the group was returning home from a two-week summer camp.
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The mother said that after the 21-year-old leader of the travelling group tried to stop the Civil Guard from taking the youngsters’ phones, “she was tackled to the ground and forcibly taken away in front of the kids, who started screaming”.
She said she “could not see what could have justified” the incident, which affected children as young as 12 and 13. “They were disembarked like dogs,” she said.
Karine Lamy, the mother of one of the children, told Israeli television channel i24NEWS that it was “an anti-Semitic act against young children who did nothing”.
