MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Court of Appeals rules in favor of most crewmembers of Emtrasur's 747

The US request to be involved in the investigation was upheld

An Argentine court of appeals Tuesday ruled that the ban from leaving the country on 12 of the 19 crewmembers of the Venezuelan freighter seized at the Ezeiza International Airport must be reviewed at the earliest.

The court gave Federal Judge Federico Villena 10 days to decide on the status of everybody involved in the case.

The Venezuelan-flagged Boeing 747-300 is grounded in the country after it was denied refueling due to US sanctions linking it to alleged Iran-sponsored terrorist activities.

The aircraft had been transferred from Iran's Mahan Air to Venezuela's Emtrasur and featured several Iranian crewmembers when it last landed in Buenos Aires on June 8.

The court also upheld Villena's decision to allow the US Judiciary to jointly participate in the ongoing investigation, which includes the fate of the airplane.

The Federal Court of Appeals of La Plata authorized the departure from the country of 12 of the 19 crew members, while Villena must speed up “all pending proceedings, the definition of the procedural situation and the restrictions imposed on persons and things.”

In other words, the magistrate is to determine whether the actions carried out by the members of the crew were punishable as per Argentina's penal code.

The ban from leaving the country on Mahdi Mouseli, Victoria Valdiviezo Marval, Cornelio Trujillo Candor, Vicente Raga Tenias, José Ramírez Martínez, Zeus Rojas Velásquez, Jesús Landaeta Oraa, Armando Marcano Estreso, Ricardo Rendón Oropeza, Albert Ginés Pérez, Angel Marin Ovalles, and Nelson Coello has been lifted, while the Iranians Gholamreza Ghasemi, Abdolbaset Mohammad, Mohammad Khosraviaragh, Seid Vali Zadeh and the Venezuelans Mario Arraga Urdaneta, Víctor Pérez Gómez and José García Contreras are still under investigation and their status is to be defined within the next few days.