adopting “confrontational behaviour”, external<\/a>… such as “attempting to loosen life jackets, tampering with overhead oxygen masks and removing a high-pressure oxygen cylinder”, violating air safety laws. <\/p>\nAn anonymous passenger gave a statement to Spain’s La Sexta TV appearing to back up Vueling’s statement, saying that some of the children had pulled life jackets out and pressed the crew-call buttons.<\/p>\n
However, other accounts have disputed the airline’s version of events.<\/p>\n
One passenger called Damien, who was at the front of the plane and not part of the young group, told Europe 1 radio that the children had been “very calm, especially for teenagers… there was one who called to his friend for two seconds but everything was perfectly fine”.<\/p>\n
Karine Lamy, the mother of a teenage boy in the group, told i24 TV that “one child sang a song in Hebrew, then he began shouting and the staff on board came up to him and the group leader and warned him immediately that if he carried on singing or making a noise they’d call the police”. <\/p>\n
She said the children then calmed down and five minutes later the police boarded the plane and told the leader and the whole group to disembark.<\/p>\n
According to Damien, a flight attendant said during the safety demonstration that there was a security issue and that they were going to call police.<\/p>\n
“There was no shouting, no violence,” he insisted, adding that he had no idea whether there had been any interruption to the safety demonstration as everyone was paying attention to it at the time.<\/p>\n
A lawyer for the Club Kineret summer camp group, Murielle Ouknine-Melki, told French TV that some of the children wore a kippah (Jewish skullcap) and she had no other explanation for what happened other than that they were Jewish.<\/p>\n
Vueling said it categorically denied that its crew’s behaviour related to the religion of the passengers. The Guardia Civil said its officers too were not aware they were Jewish.<\/p>\n
At the weekend, France’s foreign minister, Jean-No\u00ebl Barrot, contacted Vueling’s chief executive, Carolina Martinoli, to express his “deep concern” at what had happened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The airline has said it aims “to provide a rigorous and transparent account of the facts”. However, accounts…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305163,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5312],"tags":[2000,299,104],"class_list":{"0":"post-305162","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-spain","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-spain"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114944826776166275","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305162","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305162\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}