47-year-old Portuguese actor and practicing Buddhist Heitor was detained by police this week, and held for 6 hours under suspicion of terrorism after he was meditating on a flight that was awaiting takeoff from Paris.
Lourenco had allegedly frightened flight attendants and other passengers when he meditated and read a sacred Tibetan text to himself just before the plane took off. The departure was delayed, and police boarded the plane and took Lourenco away for questioning.
“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’,” Lourenco told reporters on Thursday.
Lourenco said that he was using his tablet to read the sacred text, and the app that he was using included a timer to let him know how long he was meditating. The fact that his application had a timer was allegedly what made people think it was a bomb, but it a major stretch to assume such a thing, and an extreme overreaction.
When police arrived on the scene it should have only taken him a few seconds to explain the situation, but instead he was taken off of his flight, treated like a criminal, and detained for 6 hours. Eventually, police were able to Google his name to discover that he was a well-known actor and a practicing Buddhist, and they finally let him go.
John Vibes writes for True Activist and is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter-culture and the drug war.
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