39 Palestinians seek asylum at Barcelona airport

MADRID: A group of 39 Palestinian refugees has sought asylum in Spain ater refusing to get back on a plane during a Barcelona stopover on their flight from Cairo, Spanish authorities said on Friday.

Police are investigating the charter flight that flew the group into Spain’s second-largest city on Monday, a spokesman with Spain’s Interior Ministry told The Associated Press.

The flight’s final destination was the Ecuadorean capital, Quito, with scheduled stops in Barcelona and Bogotá, in Colombia.

When the plane landed at El Prat airport on Monday, the group let the aircrat and later refused to get back on, a spokeswoman with the Spanish government’s delegation in Catalonia said.

They remained at police facilities in the airport for five days and were provided with food and assistance, the spokeswoman said.

She said that by midday Friday, 29 of them had been allowed to formally enter Spain and were being cared for by social services. The asylum requests of the 10 remaining at the airport terminal were still being processed, the official said.

She spoke on condition of anonymity, because press officials in Spain are not normally authorized to be identified by name in media reports.

Sophie Muller, the representative in Spain for the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, said that the passengers were carrying refugee documents issued by UNRWA, the UN agency that provides essential services to Palestinian refugees. She also said that many in the group had previously submited asylum applications in Egypt and Ethiopia.

Spain’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the office for asylum applications in Spain and customs checkpoints at airports, said the individual applications of the refugees were being examined. The process can take from days to weeks or even months.

Spain received nearly 50,000 asylum requests in the first 10 months of 2021, mostly from Venezuelans, Colombians and Moroccans.