PHOTO: REUTERS
PARIS: Earlier this week, a Portuguese actor humming a prayer as he meditated to a sacred Tibetan text onboard a plane awaiting takeoff was taken off the flight by police after passengers mistook him for a terrorist.
"Police told me that I had been denounced as a terrorism suspect aboard the plane because I was reciting the Koran aloud, that I was reading a text involving words 'death' and 'bomb'," the man, Heitor Lourenco, said in remarks aired by SIC television on July 2.
The incident occurred on June 30.
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Lourenco, 47, said his text, which he was reading on a tablet device, contained Tibetan characters and the device had the timer on to tell him how long he had meditated, which probably caused associations with a bomb.
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He was released after six hours of questioning during which police watched videos of him on the Internet showing that he is a theater and television actor, and checked his profile on Wikipedia, which states that he is a Buddhist.
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