France-Spain flight row over Jewish teens escalates

The dismissal of a French group of Jewish adolescents from a flight to Spain last week caused a diplomatic row, after their group leader was handcuffed by police and that a Spanish minister called them “Israeli Brats”.

The ministers of the French government Aurore Bergé and Benjamin Haddad made a strongly drafted declaration condemning the remarks of the Minister of Transport Spagnetles óscar Puente and the actions of the police.

The teenagers and their advisor were part of the group of 44 children and eight adults who were withdrawn from Vaning V8166 flight from Valencia in Paris on July 23, when they returned from a summer camp.

Vueling says that the French group was removed from the flight due to “disruptive behavior”.

The airline said it aims “to provide a rigorous and transparent report of facts”.

However, the accounts of what happened before the incident differs considerably and led to allegations of anti -Semitism, which were vehemently rejected by the airline and the Spanish police.

Videos on social networks have shown that the police have held the councilor on the ground in a corridor while they were men.

The two French ministers, who both spoke since the woman, said that she had been reported at work for 15 days due to “temporary incapacity”.

“No act justifies the discardion and the excessive and brutal appeal of force by the Civil Guardia against the young woman,” said Bergé and Haddad.

Although óscar Puente later suppressed his post describing adolescents as “Israeli brats”, the French ministers declared that they had strongly condemned his declaration to “assimilate French children who were Jewish with Israeli citizens, as if that justified any way the treatment they were subjected”.

“We will never accept the trivialization of anti -Semitism,” added the ministers.

The police said that the captain had ordered the withdrawal of the Vueling plane group after ignoring the crew instructions.

The airline made two statements since the events took place a week ago.

He allegedly alleged that the group had “poorly managed the emergency equipment and actively disrupted the compulsory security demonstration, on several occasions ignoring the instructions of the cabin crew”.

Vueling said that as part of his internal investigation, he had made declarations of witnesses to other passengers who had supported his account and that of the police.

He accused some of the children of adopting a “confrontation behavior” … like “trying to loosen the life jackets, an alteration of masks above oxygen and suppressing a high pressure oxygen cylinder”, raping the laws on air safety.

An anonymous passenger made a statement on Spanish television La Sexta, seeming to support Vueling’s declaration, saying that some children had removed life vests and supported the crew call buttons.

However, other accounts have challenged the version of the airline events.

A passenger called Damien, who was at the front of the plane and was not part of the young group, told Europe 1 radio that the children had been “very calm, especially for the teenagers … There was one who called his friend for two seconds but everything was perfectly good”.

Karine Lamy, the mother of a teenager from the group, told i24 TV that “a child sang a song in Hebrew, then he started to shout and that the staff on board came to him and the group leader and immediately warned him that if he continued to sing or make noise, he would call the police”.

She said that the children then calmed down and five minutes later, the police went on the plane and told the chief and the whole group to disembark.

According to Damien, a on -board agent said during the security demonstration that there was a security problem and that they were going to call the police.

“There was no cry, no violence,” he insisted, adding that he did not know if there had been an interruption of the security demonstration because everyone was practicing attention at the time.

A lawyer for the Kineret club summer camp group, Murielle Ouknine-Melki, said on French television that some of the children wore a kippah (Jewish Skullcap) and that she had no other explanation for what happened other than what they were Jewish.

Vueling said he had categorically denied the behavior of his crew linked to the religion of passengers. The Guardia Civil said that his officers did not know that they were Jews.

The weekend, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Noël Barrot, contacted the Director General of Vueling, Carolina Martinoli, to express her “deep concern” to what had happened.