While on a flight from Paris to Toronto, Habib Battah and his wife noticed a terrible smell coming from the area around their seats. The couple was unable to change seats and were horrified after finding out the unsanitary cause of the odor they were exposed to during their entire seven-hour flight.

Battah is a journalist and used his skills to document what took place on his flight. In the video footage, he held up a bag and said, “Look…All this blood, a whole bag of blood. Let me show you all of this is blood; look at all of this blood. It’s a hazard. It’s a health hazard.”

While attempting to scrub the blood out of his items and surroundings, he was approached by an airline worker, who bent down to pick up the bag filled with bloody cloths. He told the worker, “I’m a journalist, so I document everything.”

Battah tweeted his video footage and noted that his backpack strap was soaked in blood. “I got on my hands and knees and cleaned for half an hour. The @airfrance staff gave me gloves and more wipes. Then they casually noted a passenger had hemorrhaged on a flight before ours.”

Here I am trying to get the blood off my luggage that it absorbed from the airplane carpet. The @airfrance staff crowded around, shocked because they claimed a cleaning crew had removed the seats after the sick passenger incident, but apparently not cleaned the floor. (4 pic.twitter.com/X59rYkvaAW

— Habib Battah (@habib_b) July 1, 2023

According to Daily Mail, Battah initially wondered if the odor was coming from the couple’s cats.

Battah said: ‘It was our first time traveling with the cats, and I was thinking, “Oh god, they’ve had an accident; I’m so embarrassed.”

Battah and his wife checked their pets and, after finding their cats well, continued to search for the source of the smell. He said he wondered if the smell was from a fellow passenger before noticing a wet stain on the floor. A flight attendant supplied him with wipes, and when it kept coming up red, he wondered, “What the hell is this?”

“We had to sit there smelling the blood for the next seven hours.” While describing his experience, Battah said the blood had also soaked into his socks, “The smell of rotten blood is like manure. I’d taken my shoes off at the start of the flight, and there was blood on my socks.”

Air France admitted that a passenger had been unwell and required emergency treatment after having medical issues on a flight. The airline company issued a statement saying,

“As the flight was fully booked, it was not possible to move the passenger. An internal investigation has been launched to understand the reasons for this situation.” The statement continued in a futile attempt to diminish the unsanitary situation, “The risk of exposure to residual traces of blood on the carpet is low, if not non-existent.”

However, three days later, Battah was informed that the blood was also mixed with feces.

Battah said in his time as a journalist, he thought he had seen it all: “I’ve been covering Beirut for 20 years as a journalist. I’ve lived through wars, airstrikes, seen assassinations and car bombs, and narrowly survived the port explosion. I thought I’d seen it all. I didn’t expect to find more blood than I’ve seen in Beirut on an Air France plane.”