A plane which had been grounded since Thursday in France with its 303 Indian passengers due to suspicions of human trafficking landed in Bombay on Tuesday, after being authorized to leave. The plane, which took off Monday with 276 of the original passengers on board, landed at 4 a.m. local time (10:30 p.m. GMT) in the western Indian metropolis, an airport official said. is not authorized to speak to journalists, confirming data provided by flight tracking website Flightradar24.
The Indian authorities have not communicated on the arrival of the plane, nor indicated when its passengers could leave the airport. Among the 27 people remaining in France are two Indians who were suspected of being smugglers. These two suspects, born in 1984 and 2000, were not charged but placed under the more favorable status of assisted witnesses and therefore emerged free on Monday after their interrogation before a Parisian investigating judge.
25 other travelers, including five minors, were authorized to stay in France for the moment after making an asylum request, which will be studied at Paris’s Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport, authorities said. The plane, which left from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, was immobilized by French police on Thursday during a technical stopover intended to refuel in Vatry, near Paris, triggering a highly publicized soap opera.
The Paris prosecutor’s office explained that this decision had been taken following an “anonymous report” according to which passengers were “likely to be victims of human trafficking” in an organized gang. The plane was to go to Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, where passengers heard by the courts on Sunday said they wanted to go for a tourist stay. The courts lifted the seizure of the aircraft on Sunday and the authorities then endeavored to “obtain the necessary authorizations” for its takeoff.
“If they really are victims of trafficking, it’s not okay to just send them back.”
The classification of human trafficking by an organized gang has not been accepted for the moment because the 303 Indians, according to a source close to the case, had apparently boarded this plane voluntarily. The Paris prosecutor’s office had requested the provisional detention of the two men suspected of being smugglers. They were notified of an obligation to leave French territory (OQTF), their lawyers told AFP.
Me Salomé Cohen, lawyer for one of the two accused, praised to AFP “the extremely precise and careful reading of the investigating judge who was able to get rid of the media coverage of this case”. The judicial investigation concerns alleged acts of aiding the entry and illegal stay of foreigners in the territory in organized gangs and participation in a criminal association, said the prosecution. According to a source close to the matter, these Indians, probably workers in the United Arab Emirates, could have planned to go to Central America in order to then try to enter illegally into the United States or Canada.
“We don’t know if it’s human trafficking, migrant smuggling or neither… But we were still kept in an airport, for three nights and three days , 303 people who were on a stopover, men, women and children. It’s surprising,” Geneviève Colas, the coordinator for Catholic Relief-Caritas of the Collective against Human Trafficking, told AFP on Sunday. .
“If they are really victims of trafficking, it is not normal to simply send them back to another country,” Ms. Colas judged.
“Poor living conditions” in Vatry?
According to the Marne prefecture, individual beds, toilets and showers had been installed in the waiting area of the airport, created from scratch to deal with this unprecedented situation. The president of Châlons-en-Champagne, Mr François Procureur, was concerned on Sunday about “problems of cramped conditions” and “poor living conditions”. Justice had questioned on Sunday the legality of the procedure keeping the passengers in this waiting area, deeming it illegal for the first three passengers interviewed by a judge of freedoms and detention.
After boarding which took several hours, the Airbus A340 of the small Romanian company Legend Airlines finally took off on Monday at 2:35 p.m. (1:35 p.m. GMT). “Thank you to the French government and Vatry airport for the rapid resolution of the situation,” reacted the Indian embassy in France on X.