Sharia

He Cited Sharia to Avoid a Woman, Then Insulted the Cops in a Language One of Them Spoke

A German citizen refused his assigned seat on a Düsseldorf flight, citing Sharia law, and slapped the flight attendant who intervened. He confessed on the ground, then insulted police in Turkish. One officer spoke Turkish.

Last month, on a Turkish Airlines flight from Turkey to Düsseldorf, a man decided his assigned seat was a theological problem. It put him next to a woman.

The official version, per the police spokesman quoted in Bild, is admirably plain: the passenger invoked Sharia law and refused to sit beside a female traveler. Not cultural sensitivity, not a vague discomfort. He named the legal code he believed outranked the seating chart of a German-bound aircraft.

A flight attendant came over to sort it out, which is the job. He slapped her, which is not covered by any legal code operating at that altitude.

The plane landed. Federal police were waiting, because a criminal act on an aircraft becomes a criminal case the moment the wheels touch German asphalt. And here the story delivers its one perfect detail. The suspect confessed, and then, apparently confident he was insulting the officers in a private language, started abusing them in Turkish. One of the officers spoke Turkish. He now faces a second charge for the insults, stacked on the assault.

The other detail worth pausing on: he is not a migrant balancing a residency permit against a foreign honor code, which is how these things usually get framed. He is a 29-year-old German citizen, from the Ruhr, born into the country whose civil law he decided did not apply to his row.

That is the part nobody wants to print without three paragraphs of throat-clearing first. Not "a newcomer struggling to integrate." A citizen who concluded that a religious code overrode German law somewhere over the Balkans, and enforced that conclusion on the face of a woman doing her job. The charges are assault and insulting police officers. Process the paperwork.

Justice for the flight attendant. As for the willingness to say plainly why a German citizen thought his seat assignment was negotiable under a different legal system, that case remains open, and nobody seems in a hurry to prosecute it.

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