The National Director of the Criminal Investigation Police (PIC), Carlos Come, told AIM that the Mozambican authorities successfully demanded that Ethiopian Airlines, which had transported the Bangladeshi on a flight from Addis Ababa, should take them back again.
Immigration officials at the airport had wanted to send the 63 back immediately, but the airline did not cooperate, and the flight back to Addis Ababa took off on Tuesday without any of the Bangladeshis on board.
We held the company that brought them responsible because the company knows that it cannot transport illegal passengers, said Come. The Ethiopian Airlines representative in Maputo, however, says that the company had no way of knowing that the visas in the Bangladeshis passports were forged.
The police are still questioning the other 70 illegal migrants, all from Pakistan and Bangladesh, who were detained on Wednesday morning at a house near the airport. They, and the Pakistani owner of the house, are currently under detention at the Maputo 18th police precinct.
They have not been immediately repatriated because the police want to know how they managed to leave the airport. The suspicion is that this was only possible because of corruption in the immigration services.
Come added that some of them have genuine entry visas, and the authorities want to know how they obtained these. We are working to understand this phenomenon and to hold those involved responsible, he said.
The Asians – or at least the few among them who could speak English claimed that they had come to Mozambique as tourists or investors. But no genuine tourist or investor spends his first night in Maputo under squalid conditions with dozens of other people sleeping on the floor in a house containing almost no furniture.
Come said he was sure that the 133 Bangladeshis and Pakistanis had been trafficked by an international crime syndicate. They say they came to Mozambique to work and to invest, but we know there are other interests involved, he said.
It is suspected that they were only in transit through Mozambique, and that their final destination may well have been South Africa.
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