Three men from Portlethen who appeared in a Maltese court this week charged with endangering a plan have insisted they had “no choice but to plead guilty.”
Stuart Smith, Liam Mcrae and Craig Niddrie, were arrested alongside a group of eight others after a crew reported disruptive behaviour.
They pleaded guilty to beheading in a manner likely to endanger an aircraft or people on board, interfering with the performance of crew in their duties, being drunk on an aircraft and disturbing the public peace.
The incident took place on a flight from Edinburgh to Malta last week and the group is understood to have been on the way to a stag do.
Following this they were given fines of 1,000 euros and a sentence of five months in jail suspended for three years.
Mr Smith said they had nothing to do with the other eight.
He said: “There was a stag party on the plane, a lot of them were drinking and it was a bit of a rowdy plan and the group were wandering about the aircraft.
“The plane got put on lockdown and drugs police came on.
“About eight or nine of them came onto the plane.
“The steward pointed at us and my pals and me were strip-searched at the back of the plane which was quite scary.
“If I did something wrong I would have taken it on the chine but we didn’t do anything.”
“We had no choice but to plead guilty and take the fine.
“If we hadn’t we were going to be in custody and we didn’t want to spend a couple more nights in jail.”
