Woman Who Stowed Away on Paris Flight Tries to Flee by Bus to Canada

The woman, Svetlana Dali, had been ordered to wear an ankle monitor after her arrest, but she cut it off and boarded a bus, a law enforcement official said.

The woman who stowed away on a plane from New York City to Paris late last month was arrested on Monday after trying to leave the country again, this time on a bus bound for Canada, two law enforcement officials said.

The woman, Svetlana Dali, had been released and ordered to wear an ankle monitor after a Dec. 5 federal court hearing in Brooklyn on a charge of stowing away aboard a Delta Air Lines plane to Paris from Kennedy International Airport.

Ms. Dali, 57, a U.S. permanent resident who emigrated from Russia, was supposed to stay at a friend’s apartment in Philadelphia, one of the officials said. But she cut off her monitor and made her way to upstate New York, where she rode a bus toward the Canadian border, the official said.

Ms. Dali had a ticket for that ride, the official said, unlike the flight to Paris. She was charged with sneaking aboard that flight without a boarding pass or a passport.

On Monday night, Ms. Dali was in custody in Buffalo, Barbara Burns, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of New York, said. Ms. Dali is scheduled to appear in court there on Tuesday afternoon before Magistrate Judge Michael J. Roemer and then to be returned to custody in Brooklyn, Ms. Burns said.

Phone and email messages left for the lawyer who represented Ms. Dali in court in Brooklyn, Michael Schneider, were not returned.

Ms. Dali’s arrest on Monday was previously reported by CNN.

To get to Paris last month, Ms. Dali exploited weaknesses in the security system at Kennedy during the busiest period of the year for air travel by blending in with crowds of boarding travelers, prosecutors in Brooklyn said.

She slipped past a checkpoint by mixing in with the flight crew of a Spanish airline and then walked, undetected by Delta employees, onto a fully booked plane, they said. During the seven-hour flight, Ms. Dali tried to avoid notice by ducking into the aircraft’s bathrooms.

Delta returned Ms. Dali to Kennedy after she had spent about a week in the custody of French authorities. She was arrested there by F.B.I. agents.

At Ms. Dali’s first appearance in court in Brooklyn this month, Brooke Theodora, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said, “We’re concerned for a risk of flight here rather than the nature of the offense.”

Olivia Bensimon contributed reporting.

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