PARIS, Dec 23: Michael Philippe, a 25-year-old Virgin Atlantic flight attendant who was arrested last March by the FBI for allegedly having scribbled an anti-American message in the toilets of a London-to-Orlando flight, returned to France the other day.

He said that he was innocent of the charge, and vowed to take the US authorities to court for having detained him unnecessarily for nine months.

Arriving on French soil and seeing his wife and child for the first time since last March, Philippe announced that if he had decided finally to plead guilty to one of the four original charges, it was as part of a plea bargain he made with Florida prosecutors who told him that it was “the only way he would ever be able to return to France” and forgo 20 years in a US jail.

“After nine months of living in a nightmare,” noted Philippe, “I really didn’t have any choice but to give into their proposition. Otherwise, I’d never have seen my family nor my country again.”

During those nine months, he said, he was kept in jail one month, and spent the remaining eight under house arrest and was obliged to wear an electronic bracelet. He also was obliged to put up as bail an important amount of money, although he did not specify how large it was. Only part of the amount was returned to him, he noted during a hastily-called press conference.

His lawyer Olivier Morice noted that he had advised Philippe to plead guilty, as that was “the only way to place ourselves in a position where we will now be able to denounce the absurd methods of the US justice system.”

Morice did not detail how he and Phillipe were planning to pursue the US authorities and before what tribunal.

Philippe was working on board Virgin Atlantic Flight 27 enroute to Florida last Jan 19 when two threatening messages were discovered in his aircraft’s toilets.

One message, written in soap, indicated that “Americans must die,” while another, inscribed on an air sickness bag, claimed that “Bin Laden is the best. Americans must die. There is a bomb on board. Al Qaeda.”

Two months later the FBI, which had taken the threat seriously, attributed them to Philippe, who had reported finding the inscription, and arrested him upon his arrival at Newark International Airport near New York.