A senior bureaucrat of the government has alleged "racial discrimination" and "rude behaviour" by the British Airways, which deplaned him and his family from a flight to Berlin from London last month minutes before take off because his three-year-old son was crying onboard. The bureaucrat, in a letter to Civil Aviation Minister Suresh Prabhu on August 3, has alleged that another Indian family, sitting behind them, was also offloaded as they offered biscuits to the child to console him.

The incident happened on July 23.  The bureaucrat alleged that the crew got the plane (BA 8495) to return to the tarmac, where the security personnel took their boarding passes away. The customer care service manager did not give reasons for offloading them nor the management took action against the crew despite lodging a complaint, he claimed.