Sichuan Airlines employee suspended for online polemic remarks

Sichuan Airlines suspended one of its employees after contentious comments he posted online were unearthed, highlighting growing jitters in China after a deadly air crash last month. An internet user took to Weibo on April 10 to ask the carrier to prevent the staff member in question -- identifiable as an ethnic Mongolian Chinese national called Ayingga -- from flying because of his politically sensitive posts, some of which dated from 2015. “How did the aviation political review end up being like this?” wrote the poster, whose Weibo account has about 52,000 followers. “Is this person going to crash into a building with a full plane of passengers?” The Sichuan Airlines’ employee is accused of applauding the Nanjing Massacre, saying the people who died deserved their fate. The posts also included racial slurs against ethnic Han Chinese as well as a photo of the young man posing under what appears to be the national flag of the Mongolian People’s Republic. The original screenshots couldn’t be independently verified by Bloomberg. Ayingga couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.<br/>