The Palma duty judge has issued provisional imprisonment for the 12 detainees for fleeing a plane from Morocco that landed last Friday at the airport in the Balearic capital due to an alleged medical emergency on board. The landing forced to suspend the operation of the enclosure for three hours.
The magistrate imputes to all the detainees two different crimes of sedition: the one provided for in the Penal Code regarding the alteration of public order; and the one contemplated by the Air Navigation Law, indicates the Superior Court of Justice of the Balearic Islands. The magistrate also charged them with an alleged crime of coercion. Two of those arrested are charged with an alleged crime of favoring illegal immigration. The magistrate has not appreciated evidence of the crime of public disorder provided for in article 557 of the Penal Code. In its resolution, it argues that it seems that the events could affect public order, but not public peace.
The detainees have availed themselves of their right not to testify before the judge. The Prosecutor’s Office accuses them of alleged crimes of sedition, public disorder and favoring illegal immigration and has requested their admission to prison due to the high risk of escape, the lack of roots and the seriousness of the penalties that these crimes can entail.
The detainees, who refused to testify to the police, had been brought to justice this noon after being in the Palma National Police headquarters since their arrest at dawn on Friday. The young people have been transferred in two police vans and handcuffed in pairs to enter the judicial premises. They have waited in the dungeons of the centrally located Vía Alemania de Palma courts before appearing before the judge. After hearing the decision of the judge they have been transferred to the prison of the Balearic capital.
Investigators link the emergency landing to a post on the private Facebook group Brooklyn, made up of Moroccan citizens, in which a user invited 40 volunteers in July to participate in a plan to fake a medical emergency on a flight to Turkey. to force a landing in Spain. The passenger who caused the emergency landing, also detained, was already arrested in Spain in 2020 for damage and resistance to the authority, according to sources close to the investigation.
Possible crimes in the airspace are regulated by the Law 209/1964 Criminal and Procedural Law of Air Navigation. In article 20, referring to the crime of sedition and which contemplates a lesser prison sentence, the cases in which passengers of an aircraft can be accused of it are detailed in detail. It is the crime that was initially charged to the controllers who stopped in December 2010 causing the closure of the airspace, although the causes for this crime were archived and the Prosecutor’s Office finally chose to vary the criminal type in those that were still alive in the judged.
The 24 people involved in this event escaped last Friday from an Air Arabia plane from Casablanca to Istanbul. Nine of them were detained in the vicinity of the airport by the National Police and the Civil Guard. The person who caused the landing was also arrested by stating that he was suffering from “a diabetic crisis”, his companion (who fled and was arrested) and another person who attacked a civil guard who had boarded the plane after the incident. The rest, 12 other passengers, remain unaccounted for.
The plane from which they fled the runway while it was “remote” (in an area far from the terminal), left Casablanca on Friday after five in the afternoon (Spanish peninsular time), and when it was en route facing the Mediterranean, the crew notified the captain of the aircraft of a medical emergency for a passenger who was unwell. He allegedly “suffered a diabetic crisis,” according to police sources.
They landed in an emergency at Son Sant Joan around seven in the afternoon. An ambulance went to the scene and the toilets were able to access the warehouse through a ladder. That moment was used by a group to leave the plane and wander through the runway area and the airport facilities until jumping the fence that surrounds the airfield and leaving the enclosure. The rest of the passengers remained inside the plane.
The allegedly ill person was transferred with a companion to the Son Llàtzer hospital in the Balearic capital, where he was discharged after a medical examination in which no ailment was found. Agents of the National Police arrested him as the alleged perpetrator of a crime favoring illegal immigration and violation of the immigration law.
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