Explosives on planes are no laughing matter, but for some reason, a Portuguese woman decided to crack a bomb joke when boarding an Indonesian flight this week.
Identified only by her initials, MR, 52, was immediately removed from the Bali bound flight out of Komodo International Airport in Labuan Bajo, Flores on Thursday afternoon and pulled in for questioning.
NTT Police spokesman Jules Abraham Abast said that the tasteless joke came about when a British male passenger boarded the plane, carrying a large yellow box. When asked about the contents of the box by a flight attendant, the man said he was carrying camera equipment, but simultaneously—you guessed it—MR piped in and said “BOMBS.”
“The female foreigner known as MR, called out ‘BOMBS’. The statement was also heard by ground staff,” Abast stated on Thursday, as quoted by Detik.
Following, the plane’s captain ordered all passengers to undergo body checks and have their cabin luggage and baggage inspected.
Komodo Airport police officers did indeed find that the yellow box contained camera equipment, Abast said.
Meanwhile, MR was taken into police custody for questioning.
“She was taken to West Manggarai Police station to be checked while waiting for civil service investigators,” Abast explained
Bomb “jokes”, which do happen to be in violation of aviation safety regulations, occur more often in Bali than you would think.
In an incident quite similar with this Portuguese woman’s flop of a joke, a passenger quipped that he had a bomb in his luggage, when asked by airport security why it was so heavy on a flight from Papua to Denpasar back in July 2017.
In March 2017, a Saudi man was forced off a Lion Air flight in Bali before takeoff—the tasteless joke even caused delays at Bali’s Ngurah Rai Airport. In January 2016, a man flying from Makassar to Bali was arrested before he even boarded for trying to make a bomb joke with an airport security officer—turns out the ‘jokester’ was a policeman.
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