PHILADELPHIA — A Northeast Philadelphia woman who made international headlines last week for evading TSA security checks and stowing away on an international flight from New York City to Paris is back in jail following another daring attempt to flee the United States.

U.S. Marshals arrested Svetlana Dali, 57, near the Canadian border in Buffalo on Monday after the former Rhawnhurst resident and Russian national was caught attempting to escape the country on a Greyhound bus.

The attempted escape comes less than a month after Dali’s Nov. 26 arrest at Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport for the stowaway stunt on a Delta Airlines flight outbound from John F. Kennedy International Airport.

French authorities denied Dali entry upon landing in the country, returning her to federal custody in New York in early December. She was permitted to return to Philadelphia with an ankle monitor while awaiting trial.

But law enforcement officials told news outlets on Monday that Dali had cut her ankle bracelet over the weekend and fled the Philadelphia home of an acquaintance who had taken her in.

The FBI placed her in custody near the Canadian border after failing to produce a passport.

On Tuesday afternoon Dali appeared in federal court in Buffalo, where she was placed in the custody of U.S. Marshals and ordered to appear back in the state’s Eastern District court in Brooklyn alongside a Russian interpreter on Dec. 20.

Dali’s second arrest adds another turn in a saga that’s mired in mystery.

In the week before Dali’s Delta stunt, the Philadelphia woman filed two erratic lawsuits — including one in which she alleged she was sold for $20,000 as a slave from Moscow, and another claiming Russian military officials had poisoned her with toxic chemicals.

Meanwhile, new details have emerged about how she managed to evade detection at JFK last month.

FBI officials said Dali avoided TSA checks by blending in among a large Air Europa flight crew at an entry point for airline employees, according to an arrest warrant filed in New York on Dec. 5.

At the departing gate, Delta staff were preoccupied with other passengers as Dali boarded the flight without a boarding pass, the filing says.

Despite her successful evasions, Dali’s luck fizzled as the plane flew across the Atlantic Ocean.

Passengers reported that Dali was acting erratically on the flight, at some points yelling “Please help here!” and the “United States broke my heart.”

Dali further raised flight attendants' suspicions as she passed large amounts of time between bathrooms throughout the flight, according to media reports.

French authorities boarded the plane and arrested her upon arrival.

Mysterious origins

Dali’s time in Philadelphia raises more questions than answers.

Less than a week before her fateful boarding, Dali filed a handwritten complaint in Pennsylvania’s Eastern District Court claiming that she was sold in 2014 “by minister for Russian federation Lavrov S” to her now ex-husband, Mahdi Dali.

Dali’s claims about the sale raised suspicions of a scheme that stretched up to the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, claiming “they bought me for a game.”

“I have not a Civil Right for any countries,” Dali wrote in the complaint, naming the FBI, “General Prosecutor of Philadelphia,” state police, and her ex-husband in the suit.

But the case is at a standstill, after court officials ordered on Dec. 9 that Dali’s request for in forma pauperis — granted when a plaintiff does not have enough money to pay the court fees to file a lawsuit — was denied.

Her request could be renewed if she could explain “how she can maintain a residence with no monthly expenses, no assets and no income,” according to the order.

In addition to Rhawnhurst, Dali listed another personal address in Crescentville. She described herself as homeless in one filing.

Mahdi, who lives in the Philadelphia region with his new wife, rebuffed those allegations in an interview with the Daily Mail.

Dali claimed his ex-wife was a “fantasist” and “calculating but delusional,” and that she used him to get U.S. citizenship during their three-year marriage that began on an internet dating site.

“I was a good target for her,” Dali, who did not return a request for comment, told the Daily Mail. “I was scammed.”

Dali’s allegations didn’t stop there.

The Russian national claimed in her filing that she had never received an expected U.S. green card in the mail, and that soon after she was poisoned “by some military.”

Dali’s frantic concerns were mirrored in a second lawsuit, filed Sept. 10 in federal court in the District of Columbia. It names the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center as a primary respondent, as well as a cast of government and healthcare organizations.

The suit alleges that Dali was poisoned with “Warfare Chemical Agents” in Germany in 2023, and that the hospital turned her away for testing due to the chemicals not being in “civil use.”

“Without this test unpossible to make police REPORT, make INVESTIGATION, to find a person WHO respond for this TERRORISTIC ACT,” Dali wrote.

Dali described the failed process of trying to get Walter Reed to offer her a blood test for military-grade chemical agents, including a bid to a U.S. representative from the District of Columbia who she claimed could not help her get the test, which would require government employee approval and U.S. citizenship.

More puzzling is an exhibit attached to the filing that appears to show a toxicology report written in German and dated November 2023.

The document is branded by an Erfurt, Germany-based alternative medicine practitioner called Astrid Röckert.

More than 20 compounds are circled in pen; it is not clear who circled the compounds, which include uranium, polonium, and thorium, and Novichok — which can cause harmful effects in humans.

The Inquirer reached out to Astrid Röckert to see if the company could confirm the report’s authenticity and whether it belongs to Dali.

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