No Evacuation Of French Citizens On Special Flights From Houari Boumediene Airport
The Directorate General of National Security (DGSN) on Wednesday strongly denied the false allegations made against border police officers and officials regarding the repatriation of French nationals and residents in France by special Air France flights from Algiers Houari Boumediene International Airport.
“The Directorate General of National Security wishes to firmly deny and strongly denounce the false allegations and defamatory statements made and held against executives and border police officers and peddled on social networks concerning the repatriation of French nationals and residents in France, by special flights of the Air France company from Algiers Houari Boumediene International Airport,” said a statement from this institution.
The DGSN wishes to inform the public opinion that “repatriation operations are managed by the Consulate of the country in question, and that the entries on the lists in question, which were registered with the Air France company through SMS messages it received on telephone numbers on its account, are now recorded by candidates for repatriation on a website specific to the Consulate General of France in Algiers,” added the press release of which “Echorouk” possesses a copy.
The same source explained that “the purchase of tickets, for those registered, is made at the Air France agency, located at the El-Aurassi Hotel for passengers living in the capital and its surroundings, and at the Air France stopover at Houari Boumediene airport for those arriving from the interior of the country”, specifying that “access to the terminal for these special Air France flights is only allowed to persons duly registered on the lists of this airline company”.
In this context, the DGSN stated that ‘Air France’s station manager, its security officer and a representative of the French Consulate-General in Algiers are responsible for checking, at the entrance to the terminal, that the persons concerned are actually on the lists and are solely responsible for whether or not candidates have access to the terminal’.
“The Border Police, which has no responsibility for the fact that candidates for repatriation who are not on the Air France lists have tried to enter the terminal without success, has already managed, without incident, dozens of special flights for the repatriation of foreign nationals and residents to several other countries”, noted the DGSN communiqué, stressing that “the information thus disseminated is as erroneous as it is tendentious”.