The French authorities hope to obtain “on Monday morning at the latest” authorizations to resend by plane the Indian passengers who have been detained since Thursday night at an airport in Châlons-Vatry – about 150 kilometers from Paris – , after their aircraft was immobilized, amid suspicions of human trafficking victims.
The Paris prosecutor’s office informed AFP that the court authorized the plane in question to depart from the airport in the Marne region. “This decision allows consideration to be given to resending passengers located in the waiting area” at the airport, the prefecture later announced in a statement, without providing details on a specific destination. “Therefore, the competent authorities of the General Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGAC) are working to obtain the necessary authorizations for the takeoff of the plane, which should occur no later than Monday morning,” he added.
The possibility of departure of these Indian passengers, a total of 303, but with two still under arrest “to verify” whether the role of these two people “could be different from that of the others”, is reinforced by the cancellation by justice for a first passenger in the procedure that had kept them at the airport for three days, a decision that could be applied to the others.
This cancellation is mainly explained by the waiting time of 11 hours between the moment in which the plane was immobilized and the moment in which a request was submitted to the JLD (Juge des libertés et de la détention, in French), which constitutes “a disproportionate violation of the rights of the person,” according to the order consulted by AFP. “It is very likely that the other cases will follow the same path,” said the bâtonnier of Châlons-en-Champagne, François Procureur, in a press conference after this decision.
These JLDs were mobilized for a large-scale operation on Christmas Eve inside a building adjacent to the terminal, to rule on the retention of these passengers in the waiting area.
The 303 Indian passengers on the flight operated by the Romanian airline Legend Airlines – with a fleet of four aircraft – between Dubai (United Arab Emirates) and Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, have been detained since Thursday afternoon, after their Airbus A340 was grounded at Vatry to refuel. The prefecture of the Marne specifies that single beds, bathrooms and showers, as well as a “family zone” have been installed to ensure privacy between parents and children.
What was supposed to be just a technical stopover turned into a long immobilization after an “anonymous complaint” according to which some passengers were “prone to being victims of organized human trafficking,” the Paris prosecutor’s office told AFP on Friday. .
According to a source close to the case, these Indians, probably workers in the United Arab Emirates, could have planned to head to Central America and then try to enter the United States or Canada illegally. Among them are eleven unaccompanied minors, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.
The investigation, carried out by the National Jurisdiction to Fight Organized Crime (Junalco), aims to “verify if there are elements that corroborate” suspicions of human trafficking, according to the prosecutor’s office. Ten asylum applications were also submitted on Saturday afternoon, according to a source close to the case.
