A plane carrying 303 Indian passengers, stranded since Thursday (21) at an airport near Paris on suspicion of mass human trafficking, took off this Monday (25) for Mumbai (India), French authorities said .
The plane, an Airbus 340 belonging to the Romanian airline Legend Airlines, flying from the United Arab Emirates to Nicaragua, was blocked last Thursday during a refueling stop at Vatry airport and took off today shortly before 3 p.m. local time (11 a.m. in Brasília) with 276 of the There were originally 303 passengers on board.
Of the original group, 25 applied for asylum in France and two were held for questioning, although they were released shortly afterwards, according to court sources. Five of the eleven unaccompanied minors on the flight are among the asylum seekers.
The plane was detained following an anonymous tip that the passengers were victims of a human trafficking network. A source close to the investigation said they were likely Indian workers in the Emirates who were planning to reach Central America. From there they would attempt to move north and enter the United States or Canada irregularly.
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During the investigation, passengers stayed in Civil Defenseapproved areas with single beds, bathrooms and showers at this airport, 150 kilometers east of Paris. The departure was delayed by several hours compared to the originally scheduled time.
The airline's lawyer, Liliana Bakayoko, said many passengers refused to travel to India. “Some people don’t want to go to India. They are very dissatisfied, they want to go to Nicaragua,” explained Liliana, on a trip that, according to some passengers interviewed on Sunday, was for tourist purposes.
“Surprising” situation
“We don't know whether this is human trafficking, migrant trafficking or neither (…). But they were still held at an airport for three nights and three days, 303 people made it through a stopover men, women and children. This is something surprising,” Geneviève Colas, coordinator of the Secours CatholiqueCaritas collective against human trafficking, told AFP on Sunday (24). “If they were victims of human trafficking, it is not normal to let them leave for another country,” he added.
According to the specialized website Flightradar, Legend Airlines is a small company with a fleet of four aircraft. The court ruled out charges against the two people questioned this Monday on suspicion of involvement in a human trafficking network. The two, born in 1984 and 2000, were released with the “status” of “supervised witnesses”.
The lawyer for one of them, Salomé Cohen, welcomed the decision, saying that the judge who made it “made an extremely accurate reading that knew how to distance herself from the media coverage of this trial.” “We thank the French government and Vatry airport for the quick resolution of the situation,” the Indian embassy wrote on the X network.