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Once more group of tamils landed

De Telegraaf, 4 March 1997

A group of 21 Tamils from Sri Lanka has applied for asylum at Schiphol last weekend after arriving with a regular flight from the Bulgarian capital Sofia.

A spokesman of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND) has confirmed this yesterday. The applications for asylum have been taken into consideration.

After the incident with the group of 173 Tamils, who arrived at Schiphol on 16 February with a charter flight by Turkmenistan Airlines, this is the first time that a new group of Tamils is seeking asylum in our country.

According to a spokesman of the Platform Solidarity Groups Tamils Netherlands, the group of Tamils was refused entry into the country twice by the Royal Police Force at the airport, after their arrival with Balkan Airways. Only once a family member, who is staying in the Netherlands, interfered and involved a Tamil lawyer', the IND started processing the applications for asylum.

Human smuggling

According to staff members of the sluice team' which is trying to combat human smuggling at Schiphol, it happens more and more often that groups of asylum seekers arrive at the airport in the weekend. They are hoping to avoid the fast procedures at the registration centre at Schiphol.

In the weekend the registration centre is under-staffed, less officers, interpreters and lawyers are available. Therefore it is often not possible to process the asylum applications within the 24-hours period. The asylum seekers will then be sent to one of the asylum centres, where they wait for months for the outcome of their procedures.

The 173 Tamils who came to the Netherlands in an aircraft of Turkmenistan Airlines and who disappeared without a trace from the asylum centres within a few days, might still be staying in our country. It is possible that they went into hiding with family members here in the Netherlands, out of fear of being sent back to Sri Lanka. This assumption was made by an official of the Canadian Immigration Service. It is to be expected that some of the asylum seekers moved on to Canada.

The Canadian authorities have intensified the controls at the Canadian airports, after the charter flights of Tamil asylum seekers to Europe, but no remarkable increase of arrivals of Tamil asylum seekers could be noticed in Canada so far.

05 March 1997 09:50:55

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