British Airways crew suspected of filing false robbery report in Rio after delaying flight to London

An airline crew of three from British Airways are suspected of falsely reporting a robbery in Brazil to cover up a night of partying in Rio de Janeiro, according to the British newspaper, The Sun.

Three flight attendants, who reported getting robbed on September 5, delayed the takeoff of an trans-Atlantic flight BA248  back to London’s Heathrow Airport from Rio.

The flight attendants, whom police now suspect were hungover or intoxicated reported that they were robbed the night before and were “too traumatized to work,” according to The Sun.

But Brazilian police investigated the matter and discovered that the trio, aged 31, 39, and 40, “did not tell the truth and didn’t say what actually happened that morning.”

Investigators said the flight attendants, who claimed their phones had been stolen by the robbers actually lost their mobile devices while out on the town barhopping. Police also believe the trio took narcotic drugs.

“What is surprising is how a crew that has such an important role spends the whole night drinking and using drugs, knowing that the next day they would have the responsibility of taking care of dozens of people who would travel for hours,” Special Tourism Support Police head Patricia Alemany told Brazilian news outlet Globo.

While tracking the trio’s story, Brazilian police learned the three hailed a cab to an abandoned fuel station to a small town north of Rio called Vaz Lobo.

There, the three decided to report the fake robbery, now leading area police to charge the flight attendants with “falsely reporting a crime.”

As their evidence, police have gathered surveillance footage that depicts the three British Airways staffers still barhopping just before 5 a.m.

“They created these stories to try to justify probably inappropriate behavior outside of company rules,” assistant police chief Danielle Bullus told Globo. “But we found out that there was a theft of a cell phone from the pair who were in Vaz Lobo.”

Police suspect that one BA flight attendant drank “to the point of becoming unconscious” and had to be attended to by construction workers who showed up at the crack of dawn to begin work.

The flight attendant was so intoxicated, the construction workers reportedly needed to revive him and called for emergency medical assistance. The workers said the flight attendant “showed a pin of white powder — the police believe it to be cocaine.”

Once the revived flight attendant arrived at a Rio area hospital, he admitted to taking drugs and drinking with two Brazilian women.

The scandal is not the first for British Airways in recent days.

In September a married British Airways pilot snorted coke off a topless woman’s chest in South Africa before he was scheduled to fly a full flight to London, according to a report.

That pilot, Mike Beaton, had the night off for “downtime” in Johannesburg, but was scheduled to co-pilot a return flight to London, the Sun reported.

Instead, he revealed to a flight attendant that he spent the night partying.

British Airways is the flagship airlines for England and is the second largest carrier in the United Kingdom.

It merged with Iberia in January 2011, creating the International Airlines Group (IAG), a holding company registered in Madrid, Spain that is now the second-largest airline group in Europe.