An ‘unruly passenger’ who forced a plane travelling from Edinburgh to Tenerife to divert to a Portuguese island was ‘tasered’ by police after refusing to disembark the aircraft.
The Jet2.com flight made an unscheduled landing in Porto Santo Airport on Porto Santo Island in the Madeira archipelago on Monday.
Video footage taken at the airport - located over 330 miles away from Tenerife - and shared online showed two passengers being removed from the plane by police and security personnel.
The Madeira Regional Command of the Public Security Police (PSP) confirmed that a 26-year-old foreign national has been arrested “ for the crime of disobeying the legitimate order of the Commander of an aircraft”.
READ MORE: 'Passenger incident' forces Scots plane to land 300 miles from destination
In a statement, PSP said the plane was forced to divert to Porto Santo “after reporting a situation of a disorderly passenger, whose behaviour raised immediate concerns among the crew”.
PSP also revealed that officers were forced to “use an electric weapon of low lethal potential” to remove the passengers from the plane and “guarantee the safety of the other passengers and crew” after he refused to cooperate with them and follow their instructions.
“The citizen ended up being detained by the police present there for the crime of disobedience, following the normal procedural steps, and the flight continued to its destination”, PSP said.
Online reports suggest the inbound flight from Tenerife to Edinburgh was delayed by approximately 27 hours as a result of the diversion to Porto Santo.
The Herald has contacted Jet2.com for more information.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article