Over the weekend, a campaign began in Venezuela to demand Argentina to return the Boeing 747-300M, registration number YV3531, operated by EMTRASUR, a subsidiary of the state-owned airline Conviasa, which has been held at the Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires since the beginning of June in the framework of a judicial investigation into possible links between members of the plane’s crew and Iranian terrorist groups.
Using the hashtag #DevuelvanElAvion, not only the whole arc of Venezuelan institutions linked to aeronautics but other government agencies seconded Nicolás Maduro, who expressed a hard stance during a speech last Friday.
“Someday the hour of justice will come, someday the hour of truth will come, and that wealth, those goods, that gold, those airplanes, as in the case of Argentina that belong to Venezuela we will recover them from kidnapping and blatant theft,” Maduro said.
“Now they intend to steal from us an airplane legally owned by Venezuela in Argentina by mandate of an imperial court of the state of Florida in the United States, they intend to steal from us a gigantic and modern cargo plane,” the president continued.
“Our Venezuela raises its protest and asks the Argentine people for all their support to recover that airplane that belongs to a Venezuelan company and intends to be stolen after having it kidnapped for two months, as they stole our gold in London”, concluded Maduro, in reference to the confiscations to which other Venezuelan assets were subject abroad within the framework of different sanctions applied against the government.
Diosdado Cabello, first vice-president of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, also expressed his opinion on the matter, saying that “the Argentine government sides with those who have run over the Venezuelan people (…) it flirts with them to see how they help them. We demand the return of the Venezuelan plane to the government of Mr. Fernandez, and that it returns that plane to our territory, as soon as possible”.
“That plane was not carrying weapons, that plane was not endangering the safety of anyone, on the contrary, they endangered the safety of the crew, by denying them fuel and putting them to orbit until they ran out of fuel”, added Cabello.
The Venezuelan claim came days after the U.S. Department of Justice requested the Argentine authorities to seize the Boeing 747-300M alleging that being a U.S.-made aircraft it is subject to forfeiture due to violations of export control laws related to the unauthorized transfer of the aircraft from Mahan Air (a company they call affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Force-Qods / IRGC-QF) to Empresa de Transporte Aéreo Cargo del Sur (EMTRASUR), a subsidiary of CONVIASA.
The Boeing 747-300M was detained at Ezeiza airport on June 8 after Uruguay denied it authorization to enter its airspace.
I am from Vancouver,Canada and i wanted to say that Argentina got no right to hold
a Plane belonging to Venezuela.That is a crime and the Boeing 747-300M belonging
to Venezuela should be returned immediately. What Argentina is doing amounts to Air
Piracy and should be condemned.I didn’t think that the Gov’t of Argentina would be
involved in such Low-Down activities as stealing a Plane from another country. That is
a Black Mark against the Gov’t of Argentina and it should be settled as soon as possible.