A person accused of exposing himself and urinating on an aged lady on a flight from New York to Delhi in November final yr claimed that his co-passenger peed on herself as a substitute.
Shankar Mishra was reportedly drunk in the course of the journey onboard an Air India flight on 26 November when he allegedly unzipped his pants and urinated on the septuagenarian seated in enterprise class.
Following an outrage, Mr Mishra, an worker of American monetary providers firm Wells Fargo, was arrested final week. He was denied bail and despatched to 14-day judicial remand on Saturday.
The defendant’s lawyer, Ramesh Gupta, informed a session’s courtroom on Friday that Mr Mishra was harmless and that the girl urinated on herself.
The lawyer claimed that the girl was “affected by some illness associated to prostate” which he added a number of Kathak (classical) dancers undergo from.
“The seating system was such that nobody might go to her seat… Her seat might solely be approached from behind, and in any case the urine couldn’t attain to seat’s entrance space,” the lawyer argued.
Responding to the allegations, the septuagenarian lady mentioned his remarks had been in “full contradiction and an entire volte-face of the statements and the pleaded case of the accused in his bail software”.
She was quoted as saying by NDTV that “as a substitute of being remorseful for the completely disgusting act dedicated by him, he has adopted a marketing campaign of spreading misinformation and falsities with the intent of additional harassing the sufferer”.
She added that her intention has been to make sure that institutional modifications are made “in order that no particular person has to undergo the horrendous expertise that the sufferer suffered”.
Mr Mishra’s legal professionals had argued that there was one other lady seated subsequent to the 70-year-old who wasn’t affected in any respect, which couldn’t have been potential if the banker had peed on the sufferer.
“How is that potential, how is the opposite lady not enraged,” the lawyer requested. “This logic fails the essential physics and we’ve got been saying this from the beginning. There haven’t been any outdated grudges between each of them, what was alleged doesn’t make sense.”
The chairman of Air India-owner Tata Sons, N Chandrasekaran, final Sunday spoke of his “private anguish” over an incident saying that the airline’s response “ought to have been a lot swifter” and admitted that it “fell wanting addressing this example the best way it ought to have been”.
The airline’s crew has been accused of failing to take any motion towards the person on the time, and the incident solely got here to mild earlier this month when the girl wrote a letter to Mr Chandrasekaran.
His assertion comes after the nation’s aviation regulator pulled up the Tata Group-owned airline for its poor dealing with of the incident.
The Directorate Normal of Civil Aviation known as the crew’s dealing with of the incident “unprofessional” and criticised the airline for “systemic failure” in coping with the difficulty.
The regulator ordered Air India’s prime officers, the flight’s pilot and the crew to offer a proof of their conduct inside two weeks.
