A former Navy Seal who has previously said that he and shot and killed Osama bin Laden has been banned from Delta Airlines after removing his face mask while onboard a flight.
Per The Independent, Robert O’Neill tweeted an image of himself on the flight, where he was seeing smiling without a mask. “I’m not a p***y,” he is reported to have written in the now-deleted tweet.
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O’Neill stated in a later tweet that his wife was the person who deleted the slur from his timeline:
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The image sparked a backlash after being widely shared on social media. Delta Airlines - the airline the former Navy Seal was traveling with - then promptly banned Mr O’Neill from future flights, something the 44-year-old revealed himself in a follow-up tweet.
"I just got banned from @Delta for posting a picture. Wow," he wrote.
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Per Snopes, every major US airline requires passengers to wear face masks to limit the spread of COVID-19 while traveling. Delta Airlines says it has so far banned upwards of 100 for violating this rule.
A spokesperson for the airline said in a statement:
"Part of every customer's commitment prior to traveling on Delta is the requirement to acknowledge our updated travel policies, which includes wearing a mask. Failure to comply with our mask-wearing mandate can result in losing the ability to fly Delta in the future."
O'Neill later tweeted, "Thank God it wasn’t @Delta flying us in when we killed bin Laden... we weren’t wearing masks..."
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Snopes reports that Mr O'Neill first said in 2014 that he fired the shots that killed Osama bin Laden. The incident is said to have happened during a raid in 2011 on his compound in Pakistan. The United States government has neither confirmed nor denied Mr O'Neill's account of events.
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The former Navy Seal previously tweeted, "I shook thousands of hands and gave thousands of hugs this week. I flew on some planes. I’ll be alive next week."
Per the CDC, people should "wear masks in public settings when around people outside of their household, especially when other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain."
It adds that "masks may help prevent people who have COVID-19 from spreading the virus to others."