The FBI sent an official communication to the Argentine governmentled by President Alberto Fernández, in which he reports that the pilot of the Venezuelan-Iranian plane held in Ezeiza, Gholamreza Ghasemi, is linked to a terrorist organization.
The federal judge of Lomas de Zamora Federico Villena, who is handling the case, received the FBI report on the background and connections assigned to the pilot and in the next few hours it will return the cell phones confiscated from the Venezuelan crew members.
In the report, accessed The Observer, the US organization maintains that Ghasemi is related to the Quds Forces of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC-QF) and the Hezbollah group. “Gholamreza Ghasemi is CEO and member of the board of directors of Oeshm Fars Air, a company singled out by the US Treasury in 2019 due to its direct involvement in terrorist activity and the assistance it provides to the Quds Forces and the Iranian airline Mahan Air, that have been designated as terrorist entities”, states the report. “In addition to his managerial position, Ghasemi is also a pilot,” he details.
The FBI also says that the airline Oeshm Fars Air -that the pilot integrates- operates cargo flights “under civilian cover” for the Quds Forces and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, in order tofor instance, of “smuggling weapons and sensitive equipment from Iran to Syria“, among other things “This activity is part of the Iran’s efforts to establish a military presence around the world“.
“Oeshm Fars Air operates regular flights between Iran and Syria. As part of the efforts by Iran and the Quds Force to equip Hezbollah with weapons, advanced military components and weapons are being smuggled from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon using flights civilians from Tehran to Damascus,” he says.
And he insists: “The Quds Force operates training camps for Hezbollah in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon and has reportedly trained more than 3,000 Hezbollah fighters at the Revolutionary Guards training facilities in Iran. Quds provide approximately $100 to $200 million in funding a year for Hezbollah and have helped it rearm in violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701.”
Meanwhile, one of Judge Villena’s next procedural measures will be to return the cell phones that had been confiscated from the 14 Venezuelan crew members who are still in the neighboring country with the prohibition to leave. “In the next few hours the cell phones would be returned, and the court and the prosecution are working on refine in some way the analysis of the information to make your presentation“, judicial sources told this agency.
It was a request that they made to Judge Villena and to which the prosecutor Cecilia Incardona did not oppose, as long as the extraction of the information was already complete.
The airplane of the Emtrasur company, which has Venezuelan registration, He arrived at the Ezeiza airport on Monday of last week and is in judicial custody.
The aircraft, coming from Caracas, arrived in Buenos Aires after having made a previous stop at the Córdoba airport because that day the fog that existed at the Ezeiza international airport made landing conditions difficult.
The plane arrived in Argentina with the formal purpose of bringing auto parts, information that was verified by the agencies in charge of exercising the respective controls.
The Emtrasur flight crew planned to continue their trip on Tuesday of last week, but that was not possible because the companies with the capacity to sell fuel refused to do so as a result of the United States Department of the Treasury sanctions on the aircraft. .
With information from El Cronista.
