A court in Los Angeles sentenced Russian and Israeli citizen Sergei Ochigava, who was detained at the airport after it turned out that he had boarded a flight from Copenhagen without a ticket, passport or American visa. Data from the City News Service agency is provided by the Orange County Register.
In January, Ochigawa, 46, was found guilty of one count of being unlawfully on board an aircraft.
Ochigave was given the 93 days of imprisonment he had already served in custody, plus three years of probation and a fine in favor of Scandinavian Airlines in the amount of $2,174. Now, the report notes, citing representatives of the prosecutor's office, Ochigawa will be transferred to the immigration police (ICE) to resolve the issue of deportation from the United States.
The publication mentions that Ochigawa apparently managed to sneak through a turnstile at Copenhagen Airport following another passenger on his way into the terminal; the next day he also boarded unnoticed. When the flight landed on the afternoon of November 4, border control in Los Angeles discovered that his name was not on the list of passengers.
As Ochigawa’s relatives told the telegram channel “Beware of News,” the man lived in Moscow, and after the beginning of the war in Ukraine, he left for Israel, where he began to have “health problems and anxiety attacks against the backdrop of the geopolitical situation.” He told the border control officers at the airport that he had Russian and Israeli passports, but he could not present them — and he never asked for a visa to the United States. At the same time, in the list of materials included in the case, Ochigava’s Russian and Israeli passports are mentioned as “seized by the Danish police.”
Ochigava’s relatives said that he had an education as an economist and that he graduated from graduate school at the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, although practically nothing worked in his specialty. The electronic library Dissercat contains a dissertation defended in 2003 by a person with the same name on the topic “Organizational and methodological support for auditing the marketing activities of manufacturing enterprises.”