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JSE Alsi 'Bus rage' ad pulled after beheading on serene route
No longer appropriate and might offend, Greyhound saysAugust 08, 2008 Edition 2
Michel Comte
North American bus company Greyhound Lines has pulled billboard advertisements lauding bus travel as serene and carefree after a passenger was beheaded last week on a Western Canada route during a gruesome attack.
The cross-Canada advertising campaign touted: "There's a reason you've never heard of 'bus rage'."
"I had confirmation this morning that all of the advertisements have been removed," the bus company's spokesperson Abby Wambaugh said yesterday.
"We'd asked last week for them to be immediately pulled, realising that the ads were no longer appropriate and could be offensive," she said.
Last week, a Chinese passenger ran amok on a Greyhound bus, stabbing, gutting and beheading his young seat mate, who was on his way home to Winnipeg from a job as a carnival worker in Edmonton.
Prosecutors said police observed the accused eating pieces of his victim when they surrounded the bus on a desolate highway about 90km west of Winnipeg, immediately following the July 30 attack.
The assailant had also pocketed the victim's nose, lips and ear, and was taunting police and bystanders with the head, investigators said.
Vince Weiguang Li (40), of Edmonton, faces a second-degree murder charge in the grisly case.
Meanwhile, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) was slammed yesterday for its latest ad campaign comparing the killing of passenger Tim McLean to the slaughter of animals.
Three newspapers Peta approached refused to run it, and hundreds of Canadians have called in their support to publishers for turning away Peta's business in this instance.
"We just thought it was very disrespectful to the victim's family, and also we just thought it was inappropriate to compare a human life to an animal," said Portage Daily Graphic publisher Barry Clayton.
The Peta ad draws comparisons between cold-blooded homicide and the torture of animals in slaughterhouses, making the point that slaughter should always be shocking.
"An innocent young victim's throat is cut, his struggles and cries are ignored, the man with the knife shows no emotion, the victim is slaughtered and his head cut off, his flesh is eaten," said the Peta ad.
"We're hoping that this ad makes those who were rightly shocked by the horror of (Li's) alleged crimes consider that the same violence inflicted on Tim McLean, before his flesh was eaten, is inflicted every day on millions of chickens, pigs, fish and cows before their flesh is eaten," Peta's Lindsay Rajt said in an interview.
"If this ad leaves a bad taste in people's mouths, we just hope they will give a thought to what sensitive animals think and feel when they come to the end of their frightening journey."
McLean had been asleep, his cheek against a window when his assailant struck, stabbing him repeatedly in the chest with a "big Rambo knife".
The passengers and driver, jolted by "blood-curdling screams", fled and braced the door to trap the assailant inside the bus. - Sapa-AFP
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