hi
remember the incident back in late May this year when a PIA plane from Lahore bound for Manchester was escorted by British fighter jets and forced to land at Stansted Airport after the captain of the flight alerted the British authorities about the threat to blow up the plane blurted out by the two passengers of British Citizenry on-board the flight, who were engaged in fighting with each other.
well, those two passengers were declared ‘Idiots’ and NOT ‘terrorists’ by the British Court. they have been cleared of the charge of endangering hundreds of lives aboard a jetliner.
i hope they have a hard but valuable lesson…i think they have been in jail ever since the incident.
haha…what an idiot!
It had been claimed that the accused had made threats to blow up the plane and kill its crew and passengers after an argument broke out with air stewards 30,000 feet above ground.—File Photo.
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Published 2013-11-28 19:41:26 **
LONDON: Two men were cleared Thursday of endangering a Pakistan International Airways plane after a British court heard that they were “idiots, not terrorists”.
Mohammed Safdar, 42, and his friend Tayyab Subhani, 30, were arrested in May after their flight from the Pakistani city of Lahore to Manchester in northwest England had to make an emergency diversion to London’s Stansted Airport.
Britain scrambled Typhoon fighter jets to intercept the flight.
It had been claimed that Safdar, supported by Subhani, made threats to blow up the plane and kill its crew and passengers after an argument broke out with air stewards 30,000 feet (9,100 metres) above ground.
But the judge instructed the jury to find the pair not guilty after concluding that the case against them was “tenuous and peppered with inconsistencies”.
“Under the circumstances no jury can properly convict these men,” judge Charles Gratwicke told Chelmsford Crown Court in Essex, just outside London.
A series of witnesses had told the court that although the men acted like “idiots”, they had not made serious threats to blow up the plane.
Captain Nadeem Sufi originally alerted authorities to the scare, but told the court that once the severity of the diversion operation became clear he had tried to reverse the decision by telling air traffic control that the men were “laughing and joking”. Safdar and Subhani, who are from Lancashire in northwest England, had been returning from Safdar’s mother’s funeral in Pakistan.
Prosecutors had stressed that the pair were not ‘Islamic extremists’ or “terrorists,” but that the crew was forced to take the threats seriously.
Once on the ground, the plane was surrounded by armed police under a full-scale bomb alert.