15-Jun-13: Attention Qantas travelers: A pungent follow-up here to our earlier posts about Emirates, Qantas and Dubai

Click for our earlier posts about Emirates/Qantas
"The World's Leading Airline Partnership" 

In the course of more than thirty posts starting in September 2012, we reflected in this blog on the infuriating saga of Prof. Cyril Karabus and what we termed his Kafka-esque treatment in Dubai at the hands of the United Arab Emirates authorities.

(Click here to see our earlier posts about Emirates/Qantas, "The World's Leading Airline Partnership".)

In the course of analyzing what was being done to him, we noted time and again how Australia's Qantas airline has very recently blended a large part of its operations into the Dubai-based Emirates Airlines. And we warned of what travelers availing themselves of the Emirates/Qantas hookup might encounter in light of the Karabus affair.

Fortunately Prof. Karabus is safely home and we have discontinued our focus on him and his ordeal. But today he is interviewed in Haaretz, and we feel this ought to be more widely disseminated.

Without further ado, here is a direct quote, from "Caught in a Kafka-esque ordeal in Dubai, a South African doctor finally comes home":

...Much of Karabus’s palpable anger is directed at Emirates Airways. He says that just before leaving Canada he was told by airline personnel that there seemed to be a problem with his ticket – some official query from Dubai about him. “I asked what it was and asked them to investigate – and they assured me that it had been resolved. But they knew, they knew, oh yes, that the police were looking for me – and they let me go ahead and fly straight into a trap. What does that mean?” asks Karabus furiously. “It means that the Emirates Airways is an arm of the UAE law enforcement agency. What kind of crap is that?” Various newspapers, notably the Johannesburg Sunday Times, approached Emirates Airways both locally and at its head office to respond to Karabus' accusations. The company said it had nothing to do with Karabus' situation and refused to comment further. [Haaretz]

You can see some of our earlier notes about the implications of an Emirates tie-up for people who, like us, admire Qantas and enjoy flying it but sense something seriously worrying has happened, here.

(No response came to us from either Qantas or Emirates during the nine months of our coverage.)