A French passenger was thrown off a luxury cruise liner in the Indian Ocean for staging a "mutiny" after the captain cancelled two island stops and gave appalled customers €150 (£133) to spend on board by way of recompense.

It was supposed to be a dream cruise around the "Vanilla islands" of Madagascar, Maurice, Reunion and the Seychelles on the Costa neoRiviera liner.

But Alain Jan, a 53-year old French chef who boarded the huge boat with his wife at the French islands of la Reunion on October 26, said it turned into a "floating prison".

Two days into the trip, the trouble started when the captain announced that three stop-offs around Madagascar were cancelled due to a plague epidemic on the island.

Madagascar is currently experiencing an outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague that the World Health Organisation has said is a serious risk to the wider Indian Ocean region. More than 1,000 people in the country are infected and more than 100 have died.

"We said OK, it's for health reasons and anyway there were two other excursions left in Nosy Be and Diego Suarez," he told Le Parisien.