Photo: arabianbusiness.com
One man’s very stupid mistake will now see him spend the rest of his life behind bars and, believe it or not, this is the most optimistic outcome he could have hoped for in a trial that has been going on since October 2017.
That’s when Birju Salla from India was jailed, following a police investigation that determined he had written, printed and placed inside the toilet of a Jet Airways flight a letter claiming terrorists were about to hijack the plane. The letter was a hoax, which he assumed would get his lover fired from the airline.
According to The Guardian, Salla is the first person to be sentenced under India’s strict Anti-Hijacking Act of 2016, which actually stipulates only 2 possible outcomes: life in prison or the death penalty. He is actually lucky to have been given the former.
Salla is a married man and has 2 children. He worked in the diamond trade, which allowed him to travel by plane a lot. On one of his travels, he met and fell in love with a flight attendant on Jet Airways, and he kept trying to get her to quit her job so they could spend more time together.
He even married her in secret at some point during their torrid affair, though she probably had no idea that he was already taken. The Guardian notes that she considers herself his legal wife because their marriage was registered by the courts. She is still in contact with him, unlike the “other” wife, who abandoned him upon his arrest.
Because the flight attendant wouldn’t quit her job, Salla came up with an idea: he wrote the threatening letter and placed it in the toilet of a plane, thinking the emergency would lead to the closure of the airline. This way, he and the woman would get to spend more time together.
The Mumbai-Delhi flight made an emergency landing in Ahmedabad, and the pilots handed over the letter to authorities. They immediately realized it wasn’t legitimate, because it didn’t make too much sense: Salla had used Google Translate to convert the text from English to Urdu, so as to make it look as if a Muslim had written it.
In addition to the jail sentence, Salla has also been ordered to pay 50 million rupees in fines. His attorney plans to challenge the sentence, and says that it didn’t actually come as a surprise: “He has been in jail since October 2017 so I suppose he is getting used to it by now, he knew it was going to happen. If only he hadn’t done something so stupid.”
According to The Guardian, Salla is the first person to be sentenced under India’s strict Anti-Hijacking Act of 2016, which actually stipulates only 2 possible outcomes: life in prison or the death penalty. He is actually lucky to have been given the former.
Salla is a married man and has 2 children. He worked in the diamond trade, which allowed him to travel by plane a lot. On one of his travels, he met and fell in love with a flight attendant on Jet Airways, and he kept trying to get her to quit her job so they could spend more time together.
He even married her in secret at some point during their torrid affair, though she probably had no idea that he was already taken. The Guardian notes that she considers herself his legal wife because their marriage was registered by the courts. She is still in contact with him, unlike the “other” wife, who abandoned him upon his arrest.
Because the flight attendant wouldn’t quit her job, Salla came up with an idea: he wrote the threatening letter and placed it in the toilet of a plane, thinking the emergency would lead to the closure of the airline. This way, he and the woman would get to spend more time together.
The Mumbai-Delhi flight made an emergency landing in Ahmedabad, and the pilots handed over the letter to authorities. They immediately realized it wasn’t legitimate, because it didn’t make too much sense: Salla had used Google Translate to convert the text from English to Urdu, so as to make it look as if a Muslim had written it.
In addition to the jail sentence, Salla has also been ordered to pay 50 million rupees in fines. His attorney plans to challenge the sentence, and says that it didn’t actually come as a surprise: “He has been in jail since October 2017 so I suppose he is getting used to it by now, he knew it was going to happen. If only he hadn’t done something so stupid.”
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