CINCINNATI, Ohio — Nazia Ali had removed her sneakers, finished sending a text message to her parents and was putting on headphones and settling into her seat for the nine-hour flight from Paris to Cincinnati when a Delta Air Lines crew member approached her and her husband, Faisal.

They were excited to come home July 26 to see their three young sons following a 10th-anniversary trip to London and Paris, "the city of romance and love," he said.

What happened next would overshadow the good times they'd enjoyed: A flight crew member had complained to the pilot that she was uncomfortable with the Muslim couple in the second row of economy class. The woman was wearing a head scarf and using a phone, and the man was sweating, she allegedly told the pilot.

The pilot contacted the ground crew. He would not take off until couple was removed.

"We had been in our seats for 45 minutes," Nazia Ali, 34, said Thursday from the Cincinnati area office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "The ground agent said, `Can you step out with me? We'd like to ask you a few questions.' So I said, `Do you want us to get our things?' And he said, `Yes, please grab all of your personal belongings. You're not going to be on this flight.' "

In the wake of the couple's removal from the flight, the Muslim advocacy group filed a religious profiling complaint against Delta Air Lines to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

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Once they were led off the flight — they said they saw other Muslim women wearing head scarves seated toward the rear of the plane — they were questioned in a "rough manner" by a French security official.

"He said, `How long were you here?' We said, `Two days,' " Nazia Ali said. He asked where they stayed. They showed him the address of the hotel. He took cell phone photographs of their passports. The couple insisted they be allowed back on their flight but noticed that it was pushing back from the gate.

"He said to us, `You did nothing wrong. That's the way the world is right now,' " Faisal Ali said.