In a statement, the SEF states that the passengers were all young people of Hindu origin and presented passports with “falsified Schengen visa vignettes, trying to simulate a legal presence in Portugal that gave them the right to travel to Mexico”. The same note also added that these citizens claimed that they wanted to travel to Istanbul, but had boarding passes bound for Cancún.

“The Lisbon-Cancún route has been used by organised networks of illegal immigration, with the purpose of arriving in the United States of America from the territory of Mexico”, underlined SEF in the statement.