Qatar Airways avoids lawsuit over treatment of Australian women at Doha airport

Qatar Airways has successfully dodged an Australian lawsuit over an incident at Doha airport in which women were forcibly removed from planes by armed guards and some intimately examined. However, while the federal court dismissed the case against the airline, justice John Halley determined the five Australian women bringing the case could instead refile their claims for damages against Matar, a Qatar Airways-owned subsidiary engaged by the Qatar Civil Aviation Authority (QCAA) to run Doha airport. The five women initiated legal action against the airline in 2022, later adding the QCAA and Matar to the case over the October 2020 incident, seeking damages over alleged “unlawful physical contact”, false imprisonment and mental health impacts, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. They were among more than a dozen passengers who were escorted off the Sydney-bound Qatar Airways plane by armed guards as authorities searched for the mother of a newborn baby found abandoned in a plastic bag at Hamad international airport. The infant survived. The women were taken to ambulances on the tarmac and some were forced to submit to invasive examinations for evidence they had recently given birth. The lawsuit claims one passenger was forced to undergo a strip-search holding her five-month-old son. Qatar Airways and Matar had been seeking to prove that the “men in dark uniforms” who took the women off the plane, as alleged by the women, were Qatari police under the command of Qatar’s ministry of interior (MOI), and not employees or agents of the airline or airport. They also claimed a nurse in an ambulance who performed the examinations was not employed by them. Story has more.<br/>