2 yıl önce

Group of Palestinian refugees seek asylum at Barcelona’s airport

Spanish migration officials are evaluating the cases of 39 passengers from Cairo who were due to fly on to Colombia and Ecuador on Monday.

Reuters

The group refused to get back on the aircraft at El Prat airport to continue with their scheduled trip.

A group of 39 Palestinian refugees have been waiting in a restricted area of the Barcelona airport for the fifth day after they used a stopover of their South America-bound flight from Cairo to request asylum in Spain.

Spanish authorities said on Friday the flight from Cairo had the Ecuadorean capital, Quito, as its final destination, with scheduled layovers in Spain's second-largest city and Bogota, in Colombia.

Police are investigating the charter flight that flew into Barcelona on Monday, a spokesperson with Spain's Interior Ministry told The Associated Press.

A spokesperson with the Spanish government's delegation in Catalonia said that once they landed at El Prat airport on Monday, the group refused to get back on the aircraft to continue with their scheduled trip.

Since then, they have been taken care of with food and assistance in police facilities at the airport, the spokeswoman said.

Press officials in Spain are not usually authorised to be identified by name in media reports.

Authorities are “processing” the group's asylum request, the official said, adding that in the meantime the group hasn't been arrested and that they are “free to continue with their trip.”

Case backlog

The spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, which oversees the office for asylum applications in Spain and the customs checkpoints at airports, said the individual applications of the refugees were being examined, a process that can take from days to weeks or even months.

Spain has received nearly 50,000 asylum requests in the first 10 months of 2021, with Venezuelans, Colombians and Moroccans topping the charts of most applications.

The Interior Ministry, which has recently tried to clear a backlog of previous applications, said that over 15,000 people have been granted refugee status or other types of protection under international asylum laws this year. More than 41,000 requests were rejected.

SOURCE: AP