On Wednesday, June 22, four Venezuelan crew members that are housed in the Hotel Plaza Central Canning they went out to eat. They ordered the menu of the day which costs 950 pesos and includes a main course, a drink and dessert. The chosen option was risotto with meatballs. That day the temperature was around 10 degrees and the wind was blowing, so the hot plate helped to cope with the beginning of winter in the southern hemisphere.
The place chosen to eat was the restaurant Whowhich is inside the mall and has an agreement with the hotel to offer breakfast and meals to guests.
NEWS He was in the complex and stayed at the hotel where the Venezuelan and Iranian crew members who arrived in the country on the company plane are staying. emtrasur, which remained in the midst of controversy.
when the four Venezuelans They finished lunch, this medium approached them to try to talk about the plane affair. One of them, bald, wearing glasses and an orange jacket, looked at this chronicler and said: “Thanks, we’re not going to talk”. Another colleague, dressed in a turquoise jacket with Columbia brand diamonds and with a bottle of water in his hand, smiled and said: “We want to be calm.” A third, who came a little further back, wearing a black Adidas jacket with gold lines on his arms, only managed to shrug his shoulders, raise his eyebrows and smile with his mouth closed. The fourth companion passed by without even gesturing, he had a bit of a cold, perhaps unaccustomed to such low temperatures.
When they entered the hotel, two of them stayed talking in the reception, until the elevator arrived. Inside, in the hall, there were intelligence agents who are all day monitoring the movements of the crew members, who move freely within the complex, but always with an eye on them. In any case, even if they wanted to, they couldn’t go very far, because their passports are being held by the judge in Lomas de Zamora. Federico Villena.
The routine of the crew is not very complex, because they are almost all day inside their room. On Wednesday the 22nd, of the 14 Venezuelans, only four went out to eat, the other ten preferred to order food to the room. The five Iranians decided to stay in their rooms. A totally opposite attitude to that of the first days, when they moved around the mall with ease and even everyone went down to breakfast, lunch, snack and dinner. After the media explosion of the case and the presence of the media and the police, the crew took more shelter. They don’t like being hounded by journalists about their situation.
In addition, they do not want to abandon the rooms completely, because everything they consume is paid for in cash, so they would be carrying a lot of money on their backs. Of course, the invoice is in the name of emtrasur company and their stay is paid until Friday, June 24, although they have already talked about extending it until Monday, June 27, while, in parallel, the lawyers and the embassies process the return of the passports so that they can leave and the judicial process can continue without the presence of the crew. That remains to be seen, but just in case, the hotel has stopped taking reservations for those rooms in case they need them.
Privacy. In the hotel there is not much fuss around this episode, the permanent custody is quite discreet and they only received visits from the embassies of both countries. Only a few passengers had a small mishap the day the police raided the place to seize their phones and tablets. In the operation, the agents made a mistake with a room and tried to keep the telephones of passengers who had nothing to do with the crew. It was next door.
Other passengers complained more about the presence of the media than about that of the crew members. A passenger confessed to the hotel administrators that he was with a woman who was not his wife and he did not want some indiscreet cameraman or photographer, trying to document one of the crew members, to end up immortalizing his romance.
The most wanted man is the pilot Ghasemi Gholamreza, identified by foreign intelligence services as a senior executive of the Persian airline Qeshm Fars Air, accused of trafficking weapons, people and equipment operating for Iran’s Quds force. This airline company was sanctioned by the United States for being involved in terrorist activities. This last point is the one that unleashed the perfect storm on the crew of the plane. The alerts imposed by the United States cornered the aircraft in a part of the world where nobody wants to have problems with the northern country, added to the background of Iran in Argentina due to the attacks on the Israeli embassy and the AMIA in the decade from the ’90.
Both the Venezuelans and the Iranians were aware of the sanctions that weighed on both countries. In fact, they do business with each other, because for the rest of the world they are uncomfortable partners, especially for those who already have commercial exchanges with the United States. Attentive to this premise, a hypothesis that is being considered is that the Emtrasur company had already bought a shift to load fuel and that is why they took the risk of coming to Argentina. But the fog forced them to divert to Córdoba and in those hours it took them to get to Ezeiza, they would have missed their shift or, given the scandal that caused their arrival, they would have regretted selling them the fuel and were left stranded. They tried to reach Uruguay, but were also blocked by foreign services that, with quick reflexes, warned about the presence of this plane.
After returning to Ezeiza, they could no longer get fuel and the PSA activated a kind of improvised raid that led to the criminal case that today involves the crew and the plane. Before, the PSA had not acted. The plane spent two days in Ezeiza and there were no major problems.
In that first stage without controls, the crew members stayed at the Holiday Inn hotel, which is next to the El Mangrullo restaurant, owned by the mayor of Ezeiza, Alejandro Granados. After returning to Buenos Aires due to the failed attempt to fly to Uruguay, they changed hotels. There is even a version circulating in the intelligence community that the crew members were missing for two hours for the PSA agents, who would have remembered late to monitor their movements. The proof is that from that security force they called all the hotels in the area asking if they had received Venezuelan and Iranian guests. When they managed to locate them in the Plaza Central Canning Hotel, their souls returned to their bodies.
controversies. This was not the only role played by the Argentine government. Also the new head of Intelligence Agustín Rossi and Security Minister Aníbal Fernández left their mark on the case. Rossi tried to minimize the issue almost to ridicule by saying that there were Iranian and Venezuelan pilots because the former were teaching the latter how to fly the plane. And Aníbal Fernández maintained that Ghasemi Gholamreza was a namesake of the senior executive of the Persian airline Qeshm Fars Air. “Bad information”, CFK would say.
The case is not closed and, on the contrary, many questions remain to be answered. At this time, in court they seek to break down if there were ulterior motives on this trip and if the crew had already been to these latitudes on previous flights or with other aircraft. Striking patterns or movements are sought. Paraguay raised the suspicion that the cigarette flight to Aruba in May was very costly from a logistical point of view. So they wondered if he was carrying something else.
Here, in Buenos Aires, the Ezeiza workers were struck by the fact that part of the load was lowered by the crew members themselves through a side door, when that work is usually done by track personnel through a ramp.
Today the crew no longer have control over the plane, they just wait for the OK to leave the country. Something that, at the close of this edition, was still to be seen.
