GoAir Pilot Removed from Job for 'Objectionable' Twitter Post! – Details

Last week, GoAir fired its trainee over posting an objectionable tweet about Goddess Sita and Hinduism. However, the pilot has claimed that he was wrongfully blamed as the tweet was posted by another person with the same name.

Around the first week of June, the Twitter handle of @MohdAsif35534489 went viral over tweets which contained objectionable comments. The account has now been deleted or deactivated. Many Twitter users began tagging GoAir, with the hashtag #BoycottGoAir, since the Twitter handle’s profile said that he was a “GoAir cabin crew member.”

Following this, GoAir released a few official statements and terminated Asif Iqbal Khan’s job. But Asif refused to have had anything to do with the twitter account. He had immediately filed a complaint at the local police station and sent a formal complaint to the cyber cell.

"My name is Asif Iqbal Khan, resident of Mumbai and employee of GoAir working as a Trainee First Officer. I struggled really hard to get this job. Believe it or not but I struggled 6 Yrs to get this respected job in a respected airline and got this job in December last year 2019. My first Dream Job. But suddenly everything came crashing down yesterday with a call,” he said.

Asif Khan said that he has been getting death threats, abusive hate messages, while his mother and sister were getting rape threats. "All because of a mistaken identity and because a guy with same name as mine had abused Holy Hindu Gods," he said.

"On 4th June 2020 at around 3 pm I got a couple of call by my senior captains from GoAir enquiring about my Twitter account. I thought that something is amiss so I searched on twitter and found that Boycottgoair is trending because some person with same name as mine and his profile stating that he works as cabin crew with go air had abused Hindu Gods," Khan explained.

"But looking at his picture one can clearly see it’s someone different and not me. Then a few minutes later my brother got a YouTube link sent by his friend who works at go air as cabin crew asking if he knows the person in the video and she asked him because she saw that video and saw my brother as my mutual friend on Facebook. I then realised how huge this matter is," Khan added.

“In the YouTube video which was put by a channel named ‘Buzzing Trends Official’ the person tried to blame me for this disgusting act and to prove his point he stole photos of mine from my Facebook account and had put it in his video, but that didn’t prove anything as he had also put the profile of the fake twitter account, the impostor and on comparing the face and both the accounts again it clearly showed that it’s different person and not me.”