National Post (National Edition)
Dominican officials ignore video that clears detained Canadians, airline CEO says
Suspect, not part of aircrew, seen stashing drugs
Security video from a Dominican Republic airport shows someone unrelated to a Canadian flight crew stashing bags of cocaine in the crew's plane, crucial evidence that's been ignored by Dominican authorities for months as the Canadians languished in detention, the airline's CEO said Thursday.
The Pivot Airlines employees actually discovered the contraband hidden on the jet and reported it to police, only to then be jailed as potential suspects.
They and their passengers have been behind bars or under effective house arrest in the Caribbean nation since April.
Separate video both shows a third party hiding the contraband in the plane's avionics bay in the middle of the night, and that the employees were in their hotel the whole time, said Pivot CEO Eric Edmondson.
A local judge earlier said there was no evidence linking the Canadians to the drugs.
The footage — never reported publicly before — is conclusive proof of their innocence, argued Edmondson.
“The truly disturbing part of it is they had this from day one,” he said. “Both police and prosecutors have had those videos since the day of the incident and chose to disregard them and look in the crew's direction, which is just astronomically wrong.”
Meanwhile, the federal government has levelled its strongest criticism yet of the Dominican Republic over its treatment of the Canadians.
With the group's continued detention, the Dominican Republic risks sending a message to the whole world that it has “questionable practices” and is an unsafe destination for any pilot, Transport Minister Omar Alghabra said.
Both Edmondson and Conservative Sen. David Wells are calling on Ottawa to suspend its bilateral airtraffic agreement with the Dominican government until the Canadians are released, saying tough words are appreciated but not enough.
“There has to be strong action and right now there's no action,” said Wells.
Canada is the second largest source of Dominican tourists, with about a million people travelling there from here every year before the pandemic.
Alghabra made his comments in the Senate last week in response to a question from Wells.
“This is an extremely urgent matter,” he said. “If this issue is not dealt with due process and fairness, it sends a strong message not only to Canada but to the world that the Dominican Republic has questionable practices and it might not be safe for other crews to land in the Dominican Republic.”
The government said previously it has repeatedly raised the Pivot crew's plight with Dominican authorities, including during a meeting earlier this year between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Dominican President Luis Abinader. But it has stopped short of bluntly criticizing the other country in public. Alghabra said he also raised his concerns with the Dominican ambassador.
The minister's office declined further comment Thursday.
The Pivot CRJ-100 jet had flown a group of seven potential investors in an Alberta company and their guests to the resort town of Punta Cana early this spring. A new crew returned to fly them back to Toronto on April 5, when a mechanic flying with the plane discovered a strange bag in the avionics bay, an enclosure under the aircraft.
The crew reported their find to the airline, which then contacted the RCMP in Canada and Dominican police. Local officers discovered several more bags in the avionics bay, went off with some of them, then came back when alerted by the crew that they had left half the parcels behind, Pivot says.
They departed again and later returned with all the bags, announcing to local media that they contained 210 kilograms of cocaine.
The crew and passengers were then arrested and jailed, the men confined to a tiny cell that contained several accused drug traffickers, who threatened and tried to extort them constantly over nine days.
Judge Francis Yojary Reyes Dilone finally freed the Canadians on bail, saying there was no evidence that most of the employees and passengers even had access to the hiding spot, and no other evidence linking any of them to the drugs.
Prosecutors had made vague allegations that the plane and its occupants were a facade for a drug-smuggling scheme, according to the judge.
Pivot and its lawyers were given access to the video in August, said Edmondson. Combing through hundreds of hours of footage, they discovered images of someone placing the bags in the plane in the early morning hours of April 5.
And on two separate occasions a few days earlier, when no Pivot crew members were in the country, someone drove up to the plane and examined the aviation bay, said the CEO.
He said he can't say who it was that stashed the contraband, or release the video until it's been filed in court, but that the person's identity is clear.
Police in the Dominican Republic — a major stop on narcotic-smuggling routes — have often accused airport employees of helping drug traffickers. In a case reported by local media last December, eight airport workers in Punta Cana were detained over an attempt to smuggle 47 kilograms of cocaine to Toronto.
In a striking parallel to the Pivot incident, U.S. Customs officers discovered cocaine hidden in the avionics bay of a plane that landed in Philadelphia from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in August.