Air India urination: 'Woman peed herself', says accused Shankar Mishra in Delhi court

Shankar Mishra was accused of peeing on an old woman on an Air India flight from New York to Delhi. On Friday, Mishra denied the accusations and told a Delhi court that the elderly female passenger “urinated on herself.” He also alleged that the woman has a “problem of incontinence”.

Mishra's lawyer told the court “The complainant woman’s seat was blocked. It wasn’t possible for him (Mishra) to go there. She urinated on herself. She is a Kathak dancer, 80 per cent of kathak dancers have this issue.” 

The Judge of the Sessions Court, however, stated that it is not impossible to go from one side of the flight to the other. “Sorry, but I have travelled as well. Anybody from any row can come around and go to any seat,” the judge said. 

The lady who filed the complaint against Mishra claimed throughout the hearing that she was being threatened by those close to the accused.

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"I'm regularly receiving messages, threatening me. The accused's father sent me a message and said 'karma will hit you' and then deleted the message. They're sending me messages and deleting them. This needs to stop," her lawyers said.

In response to a notification from the sessions court regarding an application by the Delhi Police requesting custody in order to examine him, Shankar Mishra makes the astounding assertion. After a court denied the police's request for custody, he was remanded to 14-day judicial remand on January 7.

Shankar Mishra’s bail however was cancelled four days later by a judge, who called the allegations against him “utterly disgusting and repulsive.”

After the claims surfaced more than a month after the incident in late November, Mishra was taken into custody last week. He had been fired by US banking behemoth Wells Fargo and had spent days eluding law enforcement.

On November 26, Mishra allegedly urinated on the 72-year-old woman sitting in business class when he was allegedly intoxicated during the flight from New York to New Delhi.

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The woman protested to N Chandrasekaran, chairperson of the Tata Group, which controls Air India, and claimed that she was forced by the crew to accept a man's apologies.

The airline claimed it had handled the event improperly and that it was revising its guidelines for providing alcohol on planes.

The Indian aviation regulator also reprimanded the management for failing to report the event at the time and forewarned carriers to take stern action against unruly passengers.