The Justice of Argentina accepted, this Thursday (11), the request of the USA and seized a plane of the company Emtrasur – a subsidiary of the Venezuelan state-owned aviation company – detained in the country since June. The Americans allege that Venezuela evaded White House sanctions by purchasing the aircraft from an Iranian airline.
In addition, some of the crew would be linked to the Quds force, an elite of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s Shiite Islamist group. The United States classifies both organizations as terrorists. These professionals are prevented from leaving Argentina.
According to Telam, a public news agency in Buenos Aires, Judge Federico Villena acted in accordance with the treaty of mutual legal assistance in criminal matters with the US. The prosecutor in the case, Cecilia Incardona, was also in favor of the seizure.
The plane, a Boeing 747 model, landed in Buenos Aires on June 6 with a load of auto parts from Mexico. Before that, he was in Paraguay, from where he took cigarettes to the Caribbean island of Aruba.
When the aircraft landed in Argentina, local authorities forbade its supply and, two days later, the crew left for Montevideo. The Uruguayans, however, did not allow the plane to enter the country, which had to return to Buenos Aires. Since then, the case has been under wraps.
In addition to the seizure, the Argentine court accepted the participation of US federal agents in the inspection of evidence and in the analysis of documents related to the aircraft. According to the Argentine newspaper La Nación, the FBI was at the airport on Thursday.
Now, according to the Argentine press, the US wants the aircraft to be confiscated – if the process is confirmed, the plane will no longer belong to the Venezuelan company and will be handed over to the American Court.
The case, of course, sparked revolt in Caracas. On Tuesday, Venezuela’s National Assembly unanimously approved the rejection of the White House’s intention to “illegally seize” the plane. According to lawmakers, the detention is Washington’s response to dictator Nicolás Maduro’s visit to Iran in June.
Venezuelan lawmakers went so far as to say that Argentina’s president, Alberto Fernández, was a “puppet of the empire,” according to La Nación. In one of these demonstrations, the deputies also criticized the prosecutor Incardona.
On the occasion, the delegation of the Argentine Israeli Associations (DAIA) and the Attorney General’s Office expressed support for the promoter. “The Venezuelan official’s comments took place in the same week that his country’s government qualified the terrorist attack perpetrated against the Argentine Republic at the AMIA (Argentine Israeli Association) headquarters as a ‘false positive,'” added a statement from the DAIA.
In 1994, an explosion at the AMIA’s Jewish center killed 85 people and left about 300 injured – Argentines accuse Iran of supporting the terrorist attack.
