Pilot who removed Jewish children from flight trained two 9/11 hijackers
Iván Chirivella was named by Spanish airline Vueling as being in charge of the flight on Wednesday from Valencia to Paris Orly.
As the captain, he had taken the decision to call the Guardia Civil police force and expel the group of mostly teenagers for 'disruptive behaviour' and a 'confrontational attitude' towards the cabin crew.
In a statement, Vueling said that a group of children aged between 10 and 17 were returning home from a summer camp when they began meddling with the plane's safety equipment, which included trying to 'take out life vests, manipulate ceiling compartment oxygen masks and remove the high-pressure oxygen cylinder'.
The airline and the Guardia Civil denied that the decision to remove the children and their monitors had any connection to the reported singing of songs in Hebrew, as a parent of one of the children affected claimed.
According to an expanded statement on the incident issued by Vueling on Friday, Mr Chirivella, who was born in the Canary Islands in 1976, has flown for the airline since 2006.
Previously, Mr Chirivella worked as a flight instructor, including a spell at the Jones Aviation academy in Florida, where he taught 9/11 terrorists Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al Shehhi.
Atta flew a hijacked plane into the North Tower of New York's World Trade Center, with Al Shehhi directing the jet he was piloting into the South Tower 17 minutes later, causing the deaths of 2,753 people.
In a 2003 book titled Innocent Accomplice, Mr Chirivella wrote about having been one of the September 11 terrorists' flight instructors, adding that there was no way of knowing what the al-Qaeda operatives' intentions were.
He remembered Atta and Al Shehhi as 'normal lads' despite expressing 'sexist' attitudes. However, they 'never said anything bad about the US'.
He said that the two were expelled from the academy for their behaviour towards women who worked there and the attempt by one of the two men to falsify the signature of his accomplice on a training roster.
Mr Chirivella was investigated by the FBI over his connection to the two 9/11 pilots, claiming during an interview with the newspaper El Mundo while promoting his book that the bureau had treated him and many other people 'unfairly'.
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