Palma de Mallorca airport, one of the busiest in Spain in the Balearic archipelago, had to close for nearly four hours on Friday evening from 8:30 p.m. after several passengers on a plane that landed in emergency left running on the tarmac, according to airport authorities.
The plane, which was on a flight between Morocco and Turkey, was diverted to Palma de Mallorca, where it made an emergency landing due to the supposed discomfort of a passenger, said the Civil Guard.
According to the newspaper El Mundo, this passenger allegedly had a diabetic coma forcing the captain to take this emergency measure.
During the evacuation of the supposedly ill traveler and before the arrival of the ambulance, about 20 passengers took the opportunity to run away from the plane on the tarmac.
Two people were arrested immediately, said the Civil Guard and four other fugitives later in the evening near the airport.
A stunt to enter Spain illegally
According to the daily El Pais, the investigators favor, at this stage of the investigation, the hypothesis of a set-up with a view to entering Spain illegally. The passenger who complained of discomfort was taken to hospital, where he was declared in perfect health and arrested by the police for "helping with illegal immigration and breaking the law on foreigners", according to the newspaper. One of the passengers who had accompanied him to the hospital also disappeared in the wild, says El Mundo, who reports six arrests in addition to that of the simulator. It is not known for the moment how these twenty stowaways got on the plane from Casablanca, Morocco.
According to the FlightRadar24 application, the baffled aircraft was an Airbus A320 from Air Arabia Maroc, which was on a flight between Casablanca and Istanbul.
As a result of the incident, 13 planes bound for Palma were rerouted to other airports, and 16 departing flights suffered significant delays, according to airport authorities.
The airport reopened around midnight Friday evening after about four hours of closure.
