2023-12-24 12:06:01
An unprecedented legal marathon began on Sunday at Vatry airport, in eastern France, to hear some 300 Indian passengers from a flight grounded for three days by the authorities on suspicion of human trafficking.
• Read also: Plane immobilized in the Marne: unaccompanied minors among the passengers
• Read also: “Suspicions of human trafficking”: a plane with more than 300 passengers grounded in France
Time is running out for the four mobilized judges: they only have two days to see all the passengers who will be presented to them, among the 303 people confined in the reception hall transformed into a waiting area for foreigners, then 24 overtime to decide their fate.
This large-scale organization on Christmas Eve, which also mobilizes lawyers, clerks and translators, is made essential by French law.
In this type of case, the border police cannot keep a foreigner in the waiting zone for more than four days. Only a judge can extend this period, initially by a maximum of eight days then, exceptionally, by eight more. However, the last passengers placed in the waiting area were there during the night from Thursday to Friday.
11 unaccompanied minors
The 303 Indians have been confined to Vatry, a small airport near Reims, 150 km east of Paris, since Thursday evening, a few hours following the landing of their plane, an Airbus A340 of the Romanian company Legend Airlines, to make full.
The flight was initially scheduled to connect Dubai (United Arab Emirates) to Managua, capital of Nicaragua. But the technical stopover turned into a long immobilization following an “anonymous report” according to which passengers were “likely to be victims of human trafficking”, the Paris prosecutor’s office said on Friday.
According to a source close to the matter, these Indians, probably workers in the United Arab Emirates, might have planned to go to Central America in order to then try to enter illegally into the United States or Canada.
Among them are 11 unaccompanied minors, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.
Extended police custody
Ten asylum requests had also been filed late Saturday followingnoon, according to a source close to the case.
After three nights there, “it’s sure to be long” and “necessarily frustrating,” recognizes Patrick Jaloux, president of civil protection for the Marne department, where Vatry is located.
To keep themselves busy, the passengers, some of whom speak Hindi and others in Tamil, “talk a lot with their families on the phone” and “play with each other” in the play areas deployed by civil protection, says he.
The Marne prefecture specifies that individual beds, toilets and showers have been installed, as well as a “family” zone to ensure parent-child privacy”.
According to the specialized site Flightradar, Legend Airlines is a small company whose fleet is made up of four planes.
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