Muslims Taken off Plane in UK after False Accusation
Three British Muslim siblings were ordered off a plane in London while on a flight with EasyJet airlines on their way to vacation in Italy because two passengers saw Arabic text on their phones, one of the siblings said Monday in a Facebook post.
Sakina Dharas, 24, her sister Maryam, 19, and their brother Ali, 21, were on board EasyJet flight from London's Stansted Airport to the Italian city of Naples on Aug. 17, when they were ordered off the plane and met by British intelligence agents and heavily armed police right outside the plane. The two passengers had apparently reported them as possible members of the Daesh (ISIL or ISIS) terrorist group.
Sakina wrote in a Facebook post that the incident took place at 5:00 a.m. local time. "Honestly at this point, my mind freezes,” she wrote of how she felt after being escorted down the plane.
"We begin to descend the steps, and as we do, are met with the first question, initiating this bizarre and incredulous episode. 'Do you speak English?' Mind laughter. 'We only speak English, officer. We were born and bred in England.'”
An officer told them that "a passenger on your flight has claimed that you three are members of ISIS” because they "saw you with Arabic or praise be to Allah on your phone,” she quoted the officer as saying.
The interrogation lasted for more than an hour as the three siblings explained that they did not even speak Arabic and in fact were of Indian descent. Any Arabic on their phones was part of an app that includes verses from Islam’s holy book Quran, Sakina told Al-Jazeera on Tuesday.
An MI5 agent asked them about every detail of their lives, their parents, where they live and work and asked them to go through every single page on their passports and explain why they had visited those places.
"What are my rights? We would only have been allowed back on the plane if there wasn't a shred of doubt on their part, so someone must be the liar here, in which case, why were those passengers not removed for wasting police time, LYING, making false allegations and racial profiling?" Sakina wrote on Facebook.
She added that in fact her brother who has white skin and blue eyes was not "accused by the two (passengers), only myself and my hijab clad sister, because they conveniently didn't realize he was with us.”
Muslims in the United States and other Western countries have increasingly been the victims of racial profiling by staff at airlines and fellow passengers for looking Arab or Muslim, reading or speaking Arabic and at times even doing math.
The Islamophobia comes amid the xenophobic presidential election campaign of US Republican nominee Donald Trump, a major refugee crisis in Europe and a recent anti-immigration campaign in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union.
Source: Telesur
