The Ryanair cabin crew pictured lying on a Spanish airport office floor last month after becoming stranded by bad weather have been sacked.

The image was “staged” by six crew members in protest at their treatment at Malaga Airport on the Costa del Sol in the early hours of October 14th.

They were part of a group of eight pilots and 16 cabin crew based in Portugal who said they were forced to spend several hours in a room after landing at Malaga airport just after midnight following diversions caused by Hurricane Leslie.

Twenty-eight Ryanair employees spent the night in the crew room at the airport as the airline claimed that all hotels in the Malaga region were booked.

A Ryanair spokesman has now confirmed the sackings.

“All six cabin crew members in Porto were dismissed on Monday 5 Nov for breach of contract on grounds of gross misconduct, after staging a fake photograph to support a false claim (widely reported in international media outlets) that they were ‘forced to sleep on the floor’ of the Malaga crew room, which was behaviour which damaged their employer’s reputation and caused an irreparable breach of trust with these six persons,” he said.

Luciana Passo, head of the SNPVAC cabin crew union in Portugal, said the union’s legal team were now dealing with the matter.

“Ryanair thinks it was harmed by the publication of that photograph when it was no more than a show of the crew members’ justified feeling of indignation,” she said.

The airline recently released CCTV video footage showing how the crew lay down on the floor to pose for the picture that went viral on social media.