PARIS LETTER/Lara MarloweFor the French public, the treatment of Michaël Philippe, a 26-year-old French airline steward, epitomises what is referred to here as "American security hysteria" since September 11th.
Mr Philippe's father, Francois, a shopkeeper and city councillor in the alpine town of Aix-Les-Bains, recently gave a tearful interview on prime-time television, telling how his son came to be charged with "threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction against the United States" and "making false statements to the FBI".
Mr Philippe received 8,000 messages of support and President Jacques Chirac has sent a personal letter to President Bush asking him to intervene.
Last January 19th, Virgin Atlantic's flight 27 from London to Orlando "was full of children and teenagers on their way to Disney World", Michaël Philippe explained in a telephone interview from Florida.
Three hours after take-off, on a routine inspection of the aircraft's toilet, Mr Philippe noticed an air-sickness bag stuck in the edge of the mirror. Three sentences had been inscribed on it: "Ben Laden is the best", "Americans must die" and "There is a bomb on board". Writing on the mirror repeated: "Americans must die".
Mr Philippe alerted the pilot, who made an emergency landing at Keflavik, Iceland. After a complete search, the aircraft resumed its journey 22 hours later. Icelandic police asked passengers to write the test phrase "All Americans be happy", but they did not save the mirror as evidence. The five crew in the rear of the plane were questioned by an FBI agent on arrival in the US.
Mr Philippe continued working, completing three round trips to the US over two months.
Then, on March 28th, when he was about to board a flight in Newark, New Jersey, the steward was arrested, handcuffed, charged and taken away in front of his colleagues and passengers. For one month, he was held in prisons in New Jersey, Oklahoma and Florida. Each time he was moved, Mr Philippe's hands and feet were bound and he was accompanied by two US marshals.
"They thought because I was a steward, I might be capable of hijacking the plane," he says.
His father was asked to post $250,000 in bond, but a judge ruled that Mr Philippe constituted a "flight risk" and ordered him to be held in a "half-way house" in Florida. The amount of bail was doubled; the Philippe family sold property and borrowed to raise the money.
In May, Mr Philippe was allowed to move in with a French woman and her Mexican husband in Orlando, on condition he wear an electronic bracelet, respect an overnight curfew and not leave the city. His case should come to trial early in 2003.
The prosecutor in Orlando, Mr Thomas Turner, confirmed in a telephone interview that a court threw out five of six counts originally filed against Mr Philippe, on the grounds that he should have been tried in New Jersey. If found guilty of lying to the FBI, he could be sentenced to five years in prison. Pleading innocent is the "lie" he is accused of. Mr Turner added that he may refile the far more serious charge of "threatening the use of a weapon of mass destruction" in New Jersey.
The case against Mr Philippe rests on his fingerprints, found on the air-sickness bag, graphologists' reports and the testimony of four convicted criminals who claim the Frenchman confessed to them in prison.
Of course his prints were on the bag, Mr Philippe says. He intended to throw it in the waste-bin until he saw the writing. And, he notes, the FBI has not identified the palm print on the bag - a fact confirmed by the prosecutor.
Two handwriting experts consulted by Mr Philippe's lawyers say the script on the bag is not his, but that it resembles three of the passengers' writing samples collected in Iceland. The FBI says it is Mr Philippe's writing.
Mr Turner says Mr Philippe told fellow inmates that he made the threats "basically because he hated Americans". The prosecutor confirmed that convicts in America sometimes offer such information because they "are hoping for some consideration on their sentences". Mr Philippe swears he spoke to no one in prison.
When he was arrested, Mr Philippe says he was described in US newspapers as "the French terrorist" and compared to Zacarias Moussaoui, who could be executed if convicted of colluding in the September 11th attacks.
I asked Mr Philippe if he is a Muslim. "Not at all," he laughed. "I'm a practising Catholic." He was in Manhattan when the Twin Towers were destroyed. "We went to St Patrick's cathedral to pray for our colleagues who died in the planes," he said. "We told ourselves it could have been us."