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Ryanair has faced criticism after a video posted online apparently showed the airline’s crew failing to take action to remove a passenger who launched a racist tirade against a fellow traveler, AP reported.
The video, uploaded to social media by Briton David Lawrence, showed a man hurling racist insults at an elderly black woman sitting in the same row and demanding she move seats onboard a flight from Barcelona to London on Friday.
It wasn’t clear what had prompted the quarrel. Lawrence told ITV the man abused both the woman and her daughter, but flight attendants failed to eject him from the flight.
The woman’s 53-year-old daughter told the Huffington Post that they were returning from a holiday designed to cheer her mother up, a year after the death of her father.
The argument started because her mother – a member of the Windrush generation who came to the UK in the 1960s – has arthritis so it took her some time to move out of the way so the man could reach the window seat.“I know that if I was behaving like he was, or any other black person for that matter, police would have been called and we would have been kicked off the flight,” she said.
The budget airline tweeted Sunday that it had seen the footage and reported the incident to police. It didn’t provide further comment.
A spokeswoman for Essex police told The Guardian: “This incident, which we were made aware of this morning, is believed to have taken place on a plane at Barcelona airport. Essex police takes prejudice-based crime seriously and we want all incidents to be reported.
“We are working closely with Ryanair and the Spanish authorities on the investigation.”
