Travel Lawsuits Against Qatar Airways: Doha Exams, Meal Death, Allergy Suit

Travel lawsuits against Qatar Airways currently span wrongful death, in-flight negligence, and claims arising from the 2020 forced gynecological examinations at Doha’s Hamad International Airport. The highest-profile case was revived in July 2025, when Australia’s Federal Court unanimously ruled that five women pulled off a Sydney-bound flight and examined on the tarmac can take the airline to trial. Two newer U.S. cases, one over a passenger who choked to death after being denied a vegetarian meal and another over a toddler’s anaphylactic reaction to a KitKat, are also moving through federal court. Across jurisdictions, the airline’s attempts to invoke sovereign immunity have mostly failed where its commercial operations are at issue.

The Doha Airport Examinations Case

In October 2020, authorities at Hamad International Airport discovered an abandoned newborn in a bathroom. Armed guards removed more than a dozen women from a Sydney-bound Qatar Airways flight and forced them to undergo physical examinations in ambulances on the tarmac. Four of the women were examined without their consent, and three of those examinations were described as invasive, conducted by a nurse to determine whether any of the women had recently given birth. Australia’s foreign affairs minister at the time, Marise Payne, called the events “grossly, grossly disturbing.”¹

Five of the affected Australian women filed suit in 2021 against Qatar Airways, Qatar’s Civil Aviation Authority, and Matar, the company that operates the airport. They sought damages for unlawful physical contact, false imprisonment, assault, and battery, citing lasting mental health effects including depression and PTSD.²

The 2024 Dismissal

In April 2024, Federal Court Justice John Halley largely shut the case down. He ruled that the women’s claims against Qatar Airways were barred by the Montreal Convention, which governs airline liability for international travel. The convention’s exclusivity principle limits passenger claims to injuries that occur on board an aircraft or during the process of embarking or disembarking. Justice Halley found that the examinations did not fall within that window and that the airline could not be held liable for the actions of Qatari police or medical staff. He dismissed the case against Qatar Airways and struck out claims against the aviation authority on sovereign immunity grounds, though he allowed parts of the case against Matar to continue.³

The 2025 Appeal

On July 24, 2025, a full bench of the Federal Court unanimously overturned Justice Halley’s dismissal. Justices Angus Stewart, Debra Mortimer, and James Stellios found that the lower court had applied too narrow a reading of the Montreal Convention’s embarking and disembarking requirement. The panel held there was no “sufficiently high degree of certainty” that the examinations fell outside the scope of Article 17, since the women had been pulled off a plane mid-journey and never completed conventional disembarkation or re-embarkation.⁴⁵ That question, the court said, could only be resolved at trial.

The ruling also found it was premature to conclude that Matar owed no duty of care regarding the nurse who conducted the examinations. The court upheld the dismissal of claims against the Qatar Civil Aviation Authority, agreeing that its activities were public functions of the Qatari state and therefore protected by sovereign immunity.² Qatar Airways and Matar were ordered to pay the costs of the appeal. Trial is expected in 2027.⁶ Other passengers from the UK and New Zealand who were searched were not part of the lawsuit, and no class action has been filed.

Wrongful Death After a Denied Vegetarian Meal

On August 1, 2023, Asoka Jayaweera, an 85-year-old cardiologist from Southern California and a strict vegetarian, boarded a Qatar Airways flight from Los Angeles to Colombo, Sri Lanka, with a connection in Doha. About two and a half hours into the roughly 15-hour flight, he was told no vegetarian meals were available and was reportedly instructed by cabin crew to “eat around” the meat in a standard meal.⁷

Jayaweera choked while eating. His oxygen saturation dropped to 69 percent and remained critically low. He lost consciousness and stayed that way for approximately three and a half hours until the plane made an emergency landing in Edinburgh, Scotland.⁸ He was transported to a hospital but never recovered, dying on August 3, 2023, from aspiration pneumonia.⁹

His son, Surya Jayaweera, filed a wrongful death and negligence lawsuit, initially in California state court on July 31, 2025, before it was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California in October 2025.⁸ A central allegation in the complaint is that the flight crew refused to divert while the plane was over the U.S. Midwest, falsely claiming the aircraft was over the Arctic Circle.¹⁰ The lawsuit seeks damages exceeding the Montreal Convention’s statutory payout limit of approximately $175,000, plus interest and legal fees. The case remains active.

$5 Million Suit Over a Toddler’s Allergic Reaction

On April 9, 2025, Swetha Neerukonda was traveling with her three-year-old daughter on Qatar Airways flight QR-710 from Washington Dulles to Doha. According to the complaint, Neerukonda had repeatedly warned cabin crew about her daughter’s severe dairy and nut allergies. While the mother stepped away to use the restroom, a flight attendant allegedly gave the child a KitKat bar, which contains dairy.¹¹

When Neerukonda returned and confronted the crew member, the attendant allegedly mocked her concerns. The child went into severe anaphylactic shock on the plane, and the mother had to administer an EpiPen injection as her daughter’s vital signs and mental status declined. The lawsuit alleges that the crew failed to make a public announcement seeking medically trained passengers and did not contact ground-based telemedicine providers.¹² After the family transferred to a connecting flight to India, the child suffered a second reaction and was hospitalized, spending two days in intensive care.¹¹

Neerukonda filed a $5 million lawsuit under the Montreal Convention on October 31, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (Case No. 1:25-cv-01930). As of the most recent reporting, Qatar Airways had not filed a public response.¹²

Can You Sue a State-Owned Airline?

Qatar Airways is wholly owned by the State of Qatar, and the airline has repeatedly tried to use that status to block passenger suits. Courts in multiple countries have rejected the argument when the claims arise from commercial airline operations.

In the Australian examinations case, Qatar’s Civil Aviation Authority successfully claimed sovereign immunity because its actions were regulatory functions of a foreign state. The airline itself was not shielded; claims against it as a commercial carrier were allowed to proceed.⁴

India’s Bombay High Court reached a similar conclusion in 2013. Qatar Airways argued that because the Qatari state and its ruling family own the airline, it qualified as a “foreign State” requiring government permission before it could be sued. The court disagreed, holding that a company incorporated under commercial law has a legal identity separate from its shareholders and that commercial airlines are not entitled to sovereign immunity for business activities.¹³

The same question came up in Rashid v. Qatar Airways in the U.S. District of Massachusetts. Magdi and Dahlia Rashid sued over injuries Mr. Rashid sustained on a Cairo-to-Doha flight in November 2023, when cabin crew allegedly refused to help him stow luggage in an overhead bin. Qatar Airways moved to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction. Both sides agreed that the airline is an “agency or instrumentality” of Qatar under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, but the court found that the FSIA’s commercial-activity exception applied. In a December 2025 ruling, Judge Allison D. Burroughs denied the motion to dismiss, noting that the airline operates daily U.S. flights, employs hundreds of American workers, and sells tickets to U.S. consumers.¹⁴¹⁵

The Montreal Convention Shapes What Travelers Can Recover

Nearly every passenger case against Qatar Airways runs through the Montreal Convention, the international treaty governing airline liability on international itineraries. Two features matter most to travelers.

The first is the exclusivity principle: a passenger’s claim must involve an injury that occurred on board the aircraft or during embarking or disembarking. That requirement is what killed the Doha examinations case at the trial-court level and what the Full Federal Court reopened on appeal, holding that the women’s forced removal from a plane mid-journey could not be ruled outside Article 17 without a trial.⁴

The second is the damages cap. The convention sets a statutory payout limit of roughly $175,000 for passenger injury or death, which plaintiffs can exceed only by showing additional fault. The Jayaweera wrongful death complaint is pleaded to seek damages above that threshold.⁸ The Neerukonda complaint invokes the convention directly in seeking $5 million.¹² Together, the three active cases will test how far the convention stretches around in-flight medical crises, meal service failures, and forced removals from the aircraft.

1
The Guardian. Australian Witness Recounts Qatar Strip Search Ordeal
2
BBC News. Australian Women Win Right to Sue Qatar Airways Over Invasive Searches
3
NY1/AP. Australian Judge Ends Women’s Case Against Qatar Airways but Allows Lawsuit Against Subsidiary
4
The Guardian. Court Grants Leave for Australian Women to Sue Qatar Airways Over Alleged Invasive Physical Examinations
5
Norton White. Full Federal Court Holds Qatar Airways Passengers Searched at Doha Can Pursue Damages
6
CNN. Australia Qatar Airways Examination Case
7
The Straits Times. Qatar Airways Faces Lawsuit After Passenger Denied Vegetarian Meal on Flight Later Choked to Death
8
The Independent. Qatar Airways Flight Death Vegetarian Meal Choking Aspiration
9
Simple Flying. Family Sues Qatar Airways Passenger Chokes to Death
10
People. Vegetarian Chokes to Death After Eating Around Meat on Flight
11
People. Mom Files Complaint Against Airline After Daughter Has Allergic Reaction on Flight
12
Aviation24. Qatar Airways Faces $5 Million Lawsuit After Cabin Crew Allegedly Gave Allergic Child a KitKat
13
CaseMine. Qatar Airways v. Shapoorji Pallonji and Company, Appeal No. 387 of 2012
14
Mass Lawyers Weekly. Jurisdiction Airline Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act
15
GovInfo. Rashid v. Qatar Airways Group Q.C.S.C., Civil Action No. 25-cv-10109-ADB