Indian police have arrested an unruly airline passenger after a woman on board an Air India flight from New York allegedly urinated on him in business class.
Shankar Mishra was picked up by police in the southern city of Bangalore and taken to the Indian capital on Saturday, New Delhi police spokesman Suman Nalva said on Sunday.
Nalva declined to say what Mishra told investigators after his arrest. The Times of India newspaper quoted Mishra as saying that he was drunk and could not believe what he had done.
Police escort Shankar Mishra, arrested for being an unruly airline passenger, outside a court in New Delhi. (AP)
A New Delhi court sent him to jail for 14 days while police investigated the allegation that Mishra had outraged a woman’s modesty during the New York-New Delhi flight. If convicted, he faces up to three years in prison.
Sugata Bhattacharjee, another passenger on the flight, told reporters that he saw Mishra consuming excess liquor and that Mishra was speaking incoherently, asking him the same question about his family several times.
Also on Saturday, Air India issued written warnings and grounded a pilot and four cabin crew as the incident sparked outrage on social media and among activists who called for Mishra to be banned from flying for 30 days it wasn’t enough.
Air India filed a police complaint this week, even though the incident happened on November 26. He said the crew did not call the police upon landing in New Delhi as they believed the two had solved the problem on their own.
Indian media said Air India acted after being pressured by the family of the passenger, an elderly person, to punish Mishra.
Air India planes are parked at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi. (AP)
“Air India recognizes that it could have handled these matters better, both in the air and on the ground and is committed to taking action,” the airline’s CEO and managing director Campbell Wilson said in a statement.
Meanwhile, his employer Wells Fargo & Company, an American multinational financial services firm, terminated Mishra’s job as an executive based in Mumbai, the firm said in a statement on Friday.