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Rabat – A group of 17 young Moroccans, expelled from Turkiye, attempted to flee a flight that made an emergency landing in Italy on Sunday.
Spanish news outlet La Razon said that the flight from Turkiye was operated by Air Arabia Maroc and was en route from Istanbul to Tangier.
The emergency landing came as a passenger “feigned a heart attack” on the flight.
“This was the moment they seized to try to flee the aircraft, but they were intercepted by the police,” LaRazon reported on Sunday.
A similar incident took place in 2021, when 24 people, all Moroccans, except one passenger, fled an Air Arabia flight that was en route to Turkiye.
The passengers created an unprecedented scene of attempted irregular migration that many reports have since described as the “great escape.”
The same year police confirmed that the emergency landing was planned in a Facebook group almost five months ago.
Members of a Moroccan Facebook group named “Brooklyn” conceived the “great” escape plan on July 17, 2021.
In December 2022, 28 migrants escaped after another plane carried out an emergency landing at Barcelona’s El Prat airport.
In this case, a woman faked going into labor on a Morocco-Turkiye flight.
The international community has been grappling with the issue of irregular migration, and Morocco is no exception.
Last year, Moroccan police arrested around 28,863 irregular migrants last year, including 18,820 individuals of different foreign nationalities.
Police also dismantled around 121 criminal networks, while 594 organizers and mediators of migration were arrested.
Police also seized 707 documents and forged identity documents related to irregular migration cases as well as 215 boats and 31 vessels used in organized irregular migration attempts.
