Court allows month-long detention of Afghan woman at Vilnius Airport

A court has allowed the month-long detention of a 24-year-old Afghan woman who tried to fly from Vilnius to Austria without valid travel documents, LRT reported.

Border guards noticed the woman on Wednesday evening near the boarding gates at Vilnius Airport as she waited for a flight to Vienna. When asked to show identification, she presented a German identity card that had expired more than two years earlier, as well as a boarding pass stored on her phone.

After officers suspected that the document belonged to someone else, they took the woman to the border guard station. A search of her and her belongings uncovered no additional documents. During questioning, she admitted that the German identity card was not hers.

She identified herself as an Afghan citizen and showed a document confirming her nationality on her phone. She said she had bought the ticket to Vienna in another person’s name using the invalid German identity card.

The woman also described her journey from Afghanistan. She travelled on foot to Iran, reached Turkey by boat, flew from Turkey to Greece and arrived in Vilnius on a night flight on Tuesday.

The State Border Guard Service has opened a pretrial investigation into the unlawful possession and use of another person’s document. The investigation is being led by a prosecutor from the Vilnius District Prosecutor’s Office.

The offence is punishable by a fine, restriction of liberty, detention or imprisonment for up to four years.