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The New York Times reports that a Moroccan woman who took a piece of her dead husband's intestine on a flight to their home in Austria was carrying the sample because she suspected that he had been poisoned and she wanted European doctors to examine it.
The woman packed the four-inch piece in her checked baggage on a flight to the southern Austrian city of Graz, where she and her husband had been living for eight years. She acted on the advice of a doctor in Marrakesh who shared her suspicion that her husband had been poisoned at a meal the couple ate while visiting his relatives. The woman was travelling through Graz airport in the south of Austria but was reportedly stopped by officials after they observed her behaving suspiciously.
Officers determined that the woman had violated no Austrian laws by bringing the sample into the country. A Moroccan doctor extracted the piece of intestine and apparently helped pack it in formaldehyde and in thick plastic containers. Gerald Höfler, who leads the pathology institute in Graz where the intestine is being examined, described the packaging as very professional. "I would imagine that it was done by a pathologist," Höfler said. "It was absolutely secure, triple wrapped, according to European Union norms."
(Score: 2) by Marand on Thursday September 29 2016, @10:58PM
It seems that there's a war on against the unusual; anything that isn't 100% ordinary is subject to harassment.
We've always been a war with the abnormal.
If someone doesn't follow your idea of what's normal, there's clearly something wrong with them and it should be investigated or reported. Tell the police if someone is acting suspicious, they might be a criminal. Report suspicious behaviour, it might be a terrorist. If someone looks out of place or acts uncomfortable, report it, they might be a communist. Strange activity might be a sign that someone's a witch, better burn them to be sure. This has been going on for ages in some form or another.
No idea if there's any basis for this, but maybe we're just wired to be this way as a species. Unusual behaviour in animals can be a sign of disease, so perhaps we instinctively fear the unusual as a survival mechanism, and these witch-hunts against anything different are a manifestation of that.