Thelife- Habib Battah, an Air France passenger, said he found the floor in front of him "soaked in blood."
- According to Battah, an employee said a passenger had "hemorrhaged" on a previous flight.
About an hour into an eight-hour flight from Paris to Toronto, Air France passenger and Beirut-based journalist Habib Battah said he began smelling "something gross." He couldn't figure out what the smell was, or where it was coming from, until he looked down.
There, on the plane's floor, was a large stain, which Battah said in a Twitter thread was wet to the touch. What he had found was a mixture of a previous passenger's blood and feces, CNN first reported.
"At first the @airfrance attendant shrugged and gave me some wipes," Battah wrote in a tweet. "In my broken French told her it smelled like merde (shit). Then the wipes came up blood red. I used over a dozen of them."
—Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023
Battah did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, but in his post he wrote that he spent half an hour cleaning the floor in front of him — and then his own belongings, which had absorbed some of the bodily fluids. He and his wife were traveling with their two cats, and the liquid had soaked into their carriers.
"I've been covering Beirut for 20 years as a journalist," Battah told CNN. "I've lived through wars, airstrikes, seen assassinations, car bombs, and narrowly survived the port explosion. I thought I'd seen it all. I didn't expect to find more blood than I've seen in Beirut on an Air France plane."
According to Battah, the airplane staff told him the passenger had "hemorrhaged" on a flight from Paris to Boston the day before. In a statement to CNN, Air France confirmed that the prior passenger had been "unwell." Air France did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
"As per procedure in this type of situation, a complete clean-up of the area was requested and the row of seats was made unavailable on the return flight [from Boston to Paris]," the statement said.
But the rows were available again during Battah's flight to Toronto — and because it was a full flight, he and his wife were unable to swap seats for the remainder of the eight-hour trip.
Battah told CNN that three days after the flight, the airline contacted him to offer a $500 voucher and to wash their cats. He declined the offer.
"Our airfare cost $2,500 — is a 20% discount worth sitting in blood and feces for? I think it was gross negligence and someone should be held accountable," he told CNN.