Ryanair flight FR8718 from Milan to London Stansted was diverted to Paris Beauvais airport after two passengers began destroying their passports. About 15 minutes into the flight the men became “strange” and “erratic.” One tore pages out of his passport and began eating them, while the other attempted to flush his down the lavatory toilet. On arrival in France, police boarded the aircraft and arrested both men.
Afterward, the flight continued to London. Passengers reported the extreme compensation from the ultra-low cost carrier in the form of free drinks. They speculated,
- Asylum strategy: the men may have been destroying documents to frustrate identification and claim asylum upon landing in the UK. However, passport data is transmitted electronically at check-in to U.K. authorities which would make the passengers matchable with boarding records. Meanwhile, the destruction was done openly, in front of passengers rather than discreetly.
- Mental health issues: which usually don’t affect more than one passenger per flight.
Online observers overwhelmingly think the stunt was an asylum tactic, albeit a clumsy one. It doesn’t seem to have worked.
gees. Who had the energy for all of this? I’m just glad it wasn’t the conclusion I jumped to from the headline and I thought it was a case of massive food poisoning….for the entire plane….
A recent episode of a British murder mystery series showed an African doing exactly that to assure his entry and stay at a halfway house for recent illegal immigrants.
A place to stay while waiting for their asylum hearing.
@Robin Rosner — People driven to desperation do things the rest of us consider irrational. Those in this story wrongly presume that eliminating their passport buys them extra time when claiming asylum. Or, maybe, they recently watched the film 2004 The Terminal with Tom Hanks, and think they’ll get an ‘eat to bite’ with Catherine Zeta Jones….
So, anyone else gonna watch the Senate Judiciary committee debate ‘airline competition’ this afternoon at 2:30PM? Should be a riveting discussion… like, get the popcorn ready… hoping for some zingers from Louisiana’s finest, Mr. John N. Kennedy. “Pretty please. With sugar on top.”
Well, well. A French police officer covering his face. I’m sure the French libs are losing their minds over that one. Then there is that idiot filming the event.
Why inconvenience all the passengers by diverting to Paris? Did the diversion by the airline anything? Seems to me they could have just landed in London.
I had a friend that got a girlfriend into the USA for an asylum case that way from the story he told. She had spent 6 months in prison for being in his presence in Burma (it was officially Burma at that time), which was a crime, and came out needing surgery. I think she was next smuggled into Thailand. He told me he used a computer to generate a legitimate looking passport and visa. That got her on the airplane. While she was on the airplane, he destroyed her documents and flushed them. She claimed asylum when they landed from a very legitimate fear of being put in prison again if she was sent back. She was granted asylum. I met her once. Very pretty but like catching a tiger by the tail.