The not-so-friendly skies: Feds: Airplane sexual assaults not uncommon
By J.M. Lawrence
Saturday, March 26, 2005 - Updated: 07:59 AM EST
Sexual assault on airplanes is more common than most people know and is usually committed against sleeping women, according to research by federal prosecutors in Boston.
``The most common type was the touching of women sleeping on flights by men seated next to them,'' said court papers filed by Assistant U.S. Attorney John T. McNeil, who reviewed FBI and airline statistics as part of a case against an Arizona man facing trial Monday.
Delta Airlines logged 30 incidents in the skies in one year, according to papers in the government's case against Deepak Jahagirdar, a health-care executive charged with digitally raping a sleeping 22-year-old Boston woman during a midday flight from Dallas to Boston on March 31, 2002.
Jahagirdar, a 1982 Harvard business school graduate who lives in Scottsdale, allegedly placed a blanket over the woman to conceal the assault. State police took DNA evidence from his hand.
Jahagirdar's attorney, James W. Lawson, is battling to keep the government from telling jurors about the frequency of sex assaults in the sky, calling the information ``every traveling woman's nightmare'' and likely to derail a fair trial.
Federal prosecutors said that out of all crimes on airplanes investigated by the FBI in 2003, 12.5 percent involved allegations of sexual assaults.
``These reported cases, as well as the complaint statistics gathered by the FBI and Delta, reveal that sexual assaults are substantially more frequent than commonly known,'' McNeil said.
In addition to the Boston victim's testimony, the government wants to call as a witness another woman who was sexually assaulted by a stranger while she slept on a flight.
