A Istanbul court ordered the release of five suspects after the trial began on Friday over the bold escape of former Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn from Japan to Lebanon through Istanbul in December, local media reported.
Ghosn, who faced multiple charges of denying financial misconduct, managed to escape Japan despite having turned over his three passports to his lawyers.
He is believed to have been transferred between private jets at an Istanbul airport after arriving from Japan before flying to Lebanon, where he has been since his escape.
An airline employee, Okan Kosemen, and four pilots were charged with “illegally smuggling a migrant” and risked up to eight years in prison, according to the official Anadolu news agency.
They were arrested in January but were released from custody on Friday pending the end of the trial by the judge, the private DHA news agency reported.
They have been prohibited from traveling abroad.
Two flight attendants are also accused of failing to report a crime and face a one-year jail sentence, Anadolu reported. They are free awaiting trial.
Pilots and flight attendants deny the allegations.
The indictment says Ghosn was smuggled into a large “foam-coated” musical instrument case that had 70 air holes, DHA reported.
According to the Turkish prosecutor, Michael Taylor, a former member of the American special forces and the Lebanese citizen George-Antoine Zayek, recruited an employee of the private Turkish airline MNG Jet to ensure that Ghosn could transit through Istanbul.
The indictment says the MNG employee received multiple payments to his bank account totaling more than 250,000 euros in the months leading up to Ghosn’s flight.
But during the hearing, Kosemen denied being paid to help Ghosn escape, while the pilots and flight attendants said they did not know he was on board any flight.
Kosemen told the court that he realized that Ghosn was on board after a man named Nicolas Mezsaroz informed him through the Signal communication app, Anadolu reported.
“The situation scared me,” Kosemen, quoted by Anadolu, said after Mezsaroz apparently told him on the phone that he knew where the employee’s wife worked and where her son went to school.
MNG filed a complaint in January alleging that its plane was used illegally and said at the time that an employee apparently admitted to falsifying the flight manifest to keep Ghosn off the passenger list.
Ghosn, who led Nissan for nearly two decades before his 2018 arrest, was on bail awaiting trial when he fled Japan.
Ghosn’s escape was very embarrassing for Japan, which has tried to extradite the former Nissan boss.
Lebanon does not have an extradition treaty with Japan, and has so far resisted Ghosn’s requests for a return to Tokyo,
In February, Nissan filed a civil lawsuit to claim some 10 billion yen ($ 90 million) from Ghosn for what it called “years of its misconduct and fraudulent activity.”
