Meditating Portuguese actor removed from plane as a terrorism suspect (and Wikipedia helps clear his name)

It's possible you loved him in Camilo, O Pendura, and conceivable you adored him in A Tua Cara não Me É Estranha – but this week, Portuguese actor Heitor Lourenço is in the news for a less enviable role in a Tuesday incident (finally not involving WestJet).

Reuters has reported that Lourenço was removed from a Tuesday flight for "humming a prayer as he meditated to a sacred Tibetan text" – because the visual so alarmed other passengers that he was assumed to be a terrorist.

If that strikes you as unsound logic, let us continue: As the plane sat awaiting takeoff in Paris, the actor took to meditation as guided by text on his tablet device. That's Tibetan text, in harmony with Lourenço's Buddhist leanings, and yet, said the actor, in remarks aired by SIC television:

"Police told me that I had been denounced as a terrorism suspect aboard the plane because I was reciting the Koran aloud, that I was reading a text involving words 'death' and 'bomb.'"

A timer on the tablet used to time his meditation, Lourenço suspects, may have helped intensify the wave of blind fear that overtook Tuesday's concerned passengers and inspired loose, loose bomb associations. So there's that, too. In any case, after being thrown off his paid flight he was subjected to six hours of questioning, after which he was finally, justly, returned to dignified life. It seems, in the end, that the authorities eventually did come to their senses – after watching videos of Lourenço online and poring over his Wikipedia page.

2015, everyone. Enjoy it.