Argentina releases the last crew members of the Venezuelan plane held since June in Buenos Aires

One of the crew members of the Venezuelan-Iranian plane held in Argentina, this Monday before leaving the country for Venezuela. LUIS ROBAYO (AFP)

The last five crew members of a Venezuelan cargo plane held in Buenos Aires have left Argentina this Tuesday.

After three and a half months in isolation in a hotel on the outskirts of Buenos Aires under suspicion of links to terrorism, a federal judge authorized their departure after establishing that there is no consistent evidence to prosecute them.

The three Iranian citizens and the two Venezuelans who left for Caracas on Tuesday were the last of 19 crew members detained since June 8.

His silent departure from Buenos Aires is not an end point.

Although all the crew members are already out of Argentina, the plane is still seized at the international airport in Buenos Aires at the request of a United States prosecutor.

The aircraft of the company Emtrasur, a subsidiary of the Venezuelan state airline Coinvasa, was held at the Ezeiza international airport more than three months ago, during its second landing in a week in Buenos Aires.

The plane, which was carrying auto parts from Mexico, had made a two-day stopover in the Argentine capital before leaving for Uruguay, but had to return to the Ezeiza airport with the last remains of fuel after landing in Montevideo was denied. .

The plane was left stranded after no oil company wanted to sell it gasoline for fear of being sanctioned by the United States.

According to the first investigations, the Boeing 747 Dreamliner was a recent acquisition of Emtrasur: the Venezuelan company bought the plane from Iran last January, after it was part of the fleet of its own state airline, Mahan Air, for 15 years.

The transfer between two companies sanctioned by the US raised the suspicion of Washington, which accuses both of providing logistics services to terrorist groups.

The Venezuelan Emtrasur plane, photographed on June 6 in the Argentine city of Córdoba. SEBASTIAN BORSERO (AFP)

The Uruguayan refusal - and the plane's first inadvertent stopover in Buenos Aires - generated a political storm in Argentina.

Faced with complaints from the opposition, the Minister of the Interior, Aníbal Fernández, admitted that the Government received information "warning that part of the crew belonged to companies related to the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard."

The situation was not minor: Argentina has been behind some members of Al Quds for more than 20 years for the terrorist attack that in 1994 killed 85 people at the headquarters of AMIA, the Jewish mutual in Buenos Aires, in which it was the worst terrorist attack in the history of the country.

Two years earlier, a car bomb had destroyed the headquarters of the Israeli embassy in Argentina, an attack that left 22 dead.

The Argentine Jewish community is highly critical of the investigation into the attacks, and the historical links of Kirchnerism with Venezuela and Iran are one of its most recent wounds.

The Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA), which asked the Justice to investigate the aircraft, does not forgive current Vice President Cristina Kirchner for the memorandum she signed in 2013 with Tehran to facilitate the declaration of the Iranians accused of the attack.

The text was approved by the Argentine Congress, but never entered into force because the Iranian Parliament rejected it, since several of those involved have been officials.

The pact of understanding with Iran cost then-president Kirchner a court case for alleged cover-up.

The prosecutor who was investigating her, Alberto Nisman,

The DAIA had asked to pay attention to one of the plane's pilots, Gholamreza Ghasemi Abbas, who was one of the last crew members to leave the country on Tuesday.

His name, filtered on the list of passengers arrested in June, coincided with that of a member of the Revolutionary Guard and administrator of a company linked to Al Quds, according to the Argentine Interior Ministry.

What was Gholamreza Ghasemi doing on board a Venezuelan cargo plane?

Why would a plane that needs five crew carry 19?

What was the plane doing in South America?

There are no answers to those questions yet.

The complaint promoted by the DAIA has led to a dropper resolution: in the last month, all the crew members have been released after the investigations.

The federal judge in charge of the case, Federico Villena, has considered his lack of merit: he considered that he does not have sufficient elements to accuse the defendants.

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