Last week, a group of French Jewish teenagers evacuated from a Spanish flight, prompting diplomatic barriers after their group leader was handcuffed by police and a Spanish minister called “Israel boy.”
French government ministers Aurore Bergé and Benjamin Haddad issued strong wording statements condemning Spanish Minister of Transport Óscar Puente’s remarks and police actions.
The teenagers and their counselors were a group of 44 children and eight adults who flew from Valencia to V8166 in Paris on July 23 and returned home from summer camp.
Vueling said French groups were evacuated from the flight due to “destructive behavior.”
The airline’s purpose is to “provide a strict and transparent account of facts.”
However, there are great claims about what happened before the incident and led to anti-Semitism allegations that were strongly rejected by both the airline and the Spanish police.
Videos on social media showed police handcuffing female counselors while wearing them in the hallway.
Both French ministers spoke to the woman, who said she had signed for 15 days of work due to “temporary incompetence.”
“Nothing is justified by Guardia’s civil undischarge and cruel force against young women,” Bergé and Haddad said.
Although ÓscarPuente subsequently deleted his post, describing the teenagers as “Israels,” the French minister said they strongly condemned his statement “equivalent to French children of the same Jews as Israeli citizens, as if this justified the treatment they received in any way.
Ministers added: “We will never accept the trivialization of anti-Semitism.”
Police said the captain ordered the group to be evacuated from the Ville plane after ignoring the crew’s instructions.
The airline has made two statements since the incident unfolded a week ago.
It claimed that the group “made emergency equipment improper and actively undermined mandatory safety demonstrations, repeatedly ignoring the instructions of the crew”.
Vueling said it has been reported from witnesses from other passengers who support their accounts and police as part of its internal investigation.
It accuses some children of using “confrontational behaviors” such as “trying to relax life jackets, tamper with high pressure oxygen masks and remove high pressure oxygen cylinders”, which violates the Air Safety Act.
An anonymous passenger made a statement to Spain’s La Sexta TV station, which appeared to support Vueling’s statement, saying some children had pulled their life jackets out and pressed the crew call button.
However, other accounts raised objections to the airline’s version of the incident.
A passenger named Damien, who was in front of the plane rather than part of the young group, told Euro 1 that the children were “very calm, especially for teenagers… there was a guy calling his friend for two seconds, but everything was fine”.
Karine Lamy, the mother of a teenage boy in the group, told I24 TV: “A child sang a song in Hebrew and then he started yelling, and the crew on board came to him and the group leader and immediately warned him that they would call the police if he continued singing or making noises.”
The children then calmed down and five minutes later, police boarded the plane and told the leaders and the entire group to disembark.
According to Damian, a flight attendant said during the safety demonstration that there was a security issue and they would call police.
“No shouting, no violence,” he insisted, adding that he didn’t know if everyone was paying attention to it at the time, whether there were any interrupted security demonstrations.
Murielle Ouknine-Melki, a lawyer for the club’s Kineret summer camp group, told French TV that some children were wearing Kippah (the skull of the Jewish people) and she had no explanation for anything other than the situation in the Jewish people.
Vueling said it explicitly denies that the behavior of its crew is related to the passenger’s religion. Guardia Civil said that its officers also did not know that they were Jewish.
Over the weekend, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot contacted Vueling’s CEO Carolina Martinoli to express his “deep attention” to what happened.
