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| Swede Blocks Afghan Man’s Deportation by Refusing to Sit Down on Flight | Swede Blocks Afghan Man’s Deportation by Refusing to Sit Down on Flight |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| A Swedish student activist stopped the deportation of an Afghan man this week, at least temporarily, by refusing to take her seat on a packed Turkish Airlines flight, and her dramatic video of the tense standoff has gone viral. | |
| After the student, Elin Ersson, a student at the University of Gothenburg, found out that the man, who is in his 50s, was being deported, she bought a ticket for the same flight to Istanbul at Landvetter Airport in Gothenburg. | |
| Ms. Ersson, 21, live-streamed the standoff on the flight late Monday on Facebook, and footage of the 14-minute video shows her in tears, at times being confronted by crew members and angry passengers. But she also garnered some support. | |
| “I’m not going to sit down until this person is off the plane,” she says in the video, “because he is most likely to get killed if he is on this plane when it goes up.” | |
| The man’s identity was not immediately released, nor were further details about his background or his deportation. | The man’s identity was not immediately released, nor were further details about his background or his deportation. |
| In narrating the video — which had 2.7 million views of Wednesday afternoon — Ms. Ersson says that people were trying to snatch her phone and that flight attendants were instructing her to sit down. At one point, a male voice with an English accent can be heard calling her “frightening” and telling her to think of the children on the flight. | |
| “I am doing what I can to save a person’s life,” she responds. “As long as a person is standing up, the pilot cannot take off. All I want to do is stop the deportation, and then I will comply with the rules here. This is all perfectly legal, and I have not committed a crime.” | |
| She says that the long-running war in Afghanistan has made the security situation there so bad that it is not safe to send anyone back. | |
| In the end, both the Afghan man and Ms. Ersson were taken off the plane. | In the end, both the Afghan man and Ms. Ersson were taken off the plane. |
| Swedavia, the company that runs Sweden’s main airports, said the flight was delayed for about two hours. A representative for Turkish Airlines said that no one was immediately available for comment on Wednesday. | |
| The Swedish police said that they were investigating the episode but that they would not immediately discuss any details. | The Swedish police said that they were investigating the episode but that they would not immediately discuss any details. |
| The video begins with Ms. Ersson, who is studying to become a social worker, walking up the aisle and explaining to perplexed passengers why she would not sit down. | |
| At times, a stern flight attendant can be heard asking her to turn off her phone and leave the plane. Someone in the background can be heard yelling at her to sit down. She explains that the man to be deported was sitting at the back of the plane, escorted by the Swedish authorities. | |
| “The people who have been trying to deport the old man actually pushed me and tried to forcibly move me,” Ms. Ersson says. | |
| “The pilot has the right to say that he is not allowed to be on the plane,” she says, “and as long as he is not on the plane, then I will comply. I’m waiting for the pilot’s decision.” | |
| The angry man with the English accent stands up, takes her phone and tells her to stop. A flight attendant returned it, Ms. Ersson said. | |
| “I’m trying to change my country’s rules,” she tells a seated passenger. “He is going to die — because it’s Afghanistan.” | |
| About six and a half minutes into the video, people start clapping in an apparent show of support. Then Ms. Ersson starts to cry. | |
| “There’s a Turkish guy helping me out, telling me what I am doing is right,” she says, flushed and tearful. “Some people are really applauding all this what I am doing. There is a football team standing at the back. As long as they are standing, this plane is not allowed to go.” | |
| She tells someone else, “I’m very sorry that you are more worried about missing your flights.” | |
| A flight attendant returns and says that according to the pilot, the plane was going to Istanbul, not Kabul, and that a decision would be made there. | |
| Ms. Ersson didn’t budge. | |
| “I want him to get off the plane,” she says. “The pilot has the authority to make sure that he is not on the plane.” | |
| A few minutes later, a flight attendant tells Ms. Ersson that the man will be removed from the plane. A child can be heard crying in the background. | |
| “They are taking his bags out,” Ms. Ersson says, smiling and full of emotion. People can be heard clapping. “When he’s actually out, I will go out of the plane and comply with the rules,” she says. | |
| She was met at the door by airport security, at which point she stopped filming. | |
| Ms. Ersson is part of a loose network of people demonstrating against the deportation of Afghans who have been denied asylum and residency in Sweden. | |
| Hans Uhrus, a media officer for Swedavia, said by telephone that this was the first protest of this type in Sweden. “As of my knowledge, I have never heard about this before,” he said. | |
| A similar protest took place this month at Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen, where Mohammad Simone, a 19-year-old Afghan man, was scheduled to be deported. | |
| Eva Marta Granqvist, 55, an artist from southern Sweden, said she and others were fighting what she called “arbitrary” deportation decisions made by the Swedish Migration Agency. “We are a network of fellow human beings all over Sweden and around Europe who are fighting for these issues,” she said. | |
| Ms. Granqvist said that activists had received information about the planned deportation of a young gay man who had converted to Christianity and was scheduled to be deported. They raised nearly $1,500 for two tickets to Kabul, and she and one other woman boarded the plane, she said. | |
| “We ignored the instructions to sit down in our seats,” she recalled. “When we went farther back in the plane, we could hear how he was crying loudly and pleading to the other passengers for his life.” | |
| “I asked people in the plane to stand up,” Ms. Granqvist said. “I explained that this was about a human life and that we together could save a human life. Many stood up.” | |
| “Then the captain made the immediate decision not to fly and to take off the boy,” she added. “We also went off the plane and the action was complete.” | |
| Mr. Simone is being held in a deportation center in Denmark, she said. | |
| As for Ms. Ersson, she will probably face some penalty for refusing to obey a pilot’s orders, and the man’s deportation is likely to be carried out later. | |
| But Hans Lippens, a spokesman for the Swedish Police in Gothenburg, said Ms. Ersson’s refusal to sit down constituted a civil infraction rather than a crime. | |
| “It is up to Turkish Airlines to sue the woman for the two- to three-hour delay,” he said. “There can be costs associated with delays. She has not done anything punishable from a police perspective.” | |
| There have been other acts of resistance against the deportation of migrants from Europe and in the United States. Some pilots in Germany have refused to fly rejected asylum seekers out of the country. Virgin Atlantic has said it would no longer assist the British authorities in flying undocumented immigrants. | |
| And United Airlines and American Airlines asked the Trump administration not to use their planes to fly migrant children separated from their parents at the border. |