German airport security publicly strips Frenchman
From Agence France-Presse...
"Wednesday I was going through the metal detector gate to take the plane and the alarm went off," said Rene Auguy, 59, from Saran in central France, recounting the incident at Cologne airport in western Germany.
"I was expecting it because I have a prosthesis, a metal plate as big as your hand at the top of my pelvis. I show a paper in French and English which explains the problem," he said.
"And then the security official pulls up my shirt and pulls my trousers down to the middle of my thighs. I find myself in my underpants in front of 300 people.
"The man runs his detector over me, and it gives the alarm. He takes me pretty violently to a booth about seven metres from the gate. I was going to take off my prosthesis when the man suddenly pulls down my underpants in front of everyone, the curtains were not closed," he said.
"I felt humiliated. And in the plane people were making fun of me. I had to tell them how to behave."
The German airline and airport are claiming they never heard anything about it. Auguy is a senior member of a French association for accident victims as well as a refrigeration engineer.
I has been over 50 years since Nazi Germany invaded and occupied France, so I'd imagine the French would be a bit unfamiliar with having Germans publicly strip them of their dignity. But then you'd think that the way the French government behaves these days, they'd be a little more used to it.
Posted by Danny Carlton at September 13, 2005 05:55 AM