A Swedish activist has blocked the deportation of a failed Afghan asylum seeker by refusing to sit down on a flight, crying, and live-streaming the chaos online.
University student Elin Ersson, 21, had booked a seat on the flight to Turkey Monday and refused to stop the disruption unless the migrant was taken off the plane.
Her live video of the ensuing confrontation, posted to Facebook, shows concerned airline crew trying to reason with her and frustrated passengers asking her not to frighten people.
A commercial passenger plane cannot legally take off until all those on board are seated with their belts fastened.
Peter Whittle, UKIP’s leader in the London Assembly, took to Twitter to blast the girl as “the ultimate in self-absorbed, bone-headed virtue-signalling. And probably, also one of the reasons why Sweden is on the way out.”
Ersson had joined a demonstration against Sweden’s deportation policies along with a group of 25 fellow activists before boarding the plane, DW reports.
Police reportedly later pointed out that passengers who refuse to obey a pilot’s orders while on board a plane can be hit with fines or even six months in jail.
Furthermore, the protest will prove only temporarily successful, as authorities also told DW the migrant was now in custody and will be deported later.
In the Facebook video, which has been viewed millions of times, a British man is heard saying: “You’re upsetting all the people down there.”
Someone else says: “You’re preventing all these passengers going to their destination.”
The Guardian reports that Ersson, who has studied at the University of Gothenburg to become a social worker, has volunteered with a refugee group for roughly a year.
“I hope that people start questioning how their country treats refugees. We need to start seeing the people whose lives our immigration [policies] are destroying,” she told the paper.
“I knew that I had legal rights on my side,” she added. “I knew I would have back-up from security on the plane.”
The protest comes amid continuing — and often unsuccessful — attempts by European governments to deport illegal migrants to their countries of origin. In April, Breitbart London reported the Germany government was launching a new deportation scheme after a report found that 21,000 attempts to send illegals home had failed in 2017. Among those, 9,200 deportations failed to go ahead because the migrants had disappeared and could not be found by police, and in 314 cases, pilots refused to take them onboard their aircraft for political reasons.
In Elin Ersson’s native Sweden, a report published in May found that of the 9,000 Afghan ‘children’ permitted to stay in the country because of their age, 78 per cent were actually adults. Swedish activists were seen “screaming and crying” at a protest at Landvetter airport in 2017, as they attempted to block the deportation of around a dozen Afghan illegals who had been caught lying about their true ages. The deportation went ahead as planned.
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