Duped by agent, 25 passengers yanked off Muscat flight

November 29: The flight to a better life in the Middle East was aborted on the runway for 25 semi-literate labourers from Rajasthan when ...

November 29: The flight to a better life in the Middle East was aborted on the runway for 25 semi-literate labourers from Rajasthan when immigration officers of the Mumbai police marched into the aircraft minutes before takeoff to re-verify their travel documents.

The bust took place just before the Mumbai-Muscat Air-India flight was to depart from the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport at 6.45 am on Friday. Most of the passengers were already seated in the aircraft when some of them were told to disembark for further scrutiny of their travel documents. Turned out that 25 passengers, who had collectively paid a Dadar-based travel agent Rs 12.5 lakh (Rs 50,000 each), had been given bogus documents with the promise of employment in Muscat.

Senior Police Inspector, Sahar police station, V Madavi, told Express Newsline that it is the first time as many as 25 passengers have been caught with fake documents at the international airport. While about six to seven of the vicitms have returned toRajasthan, the rest are still in Mumbai as investigations are underway. Their passports have been seized by the police, who refuse to disclose the name of the travel agency, saying it could hamper investigations. The travel agent himself is absconding.

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Says one of the victims: “We are unskilled labourers who had been promised good jobs in Muscat, which is why we readily paid Rs 50,000 each to the travel agency. It was only when some of us were pulled out of the plane at the last minute that we realised something was amiss.” An acquaintance of another victim says repeated attempts to trace the agents on the telephone failed as no one answered the office or the mobile phone numbers given to the victims after Friday’s high drama at the airport.

Apart from such travel frauds, another well-known racket involves changing the passengers’ identity in passports and visas in order to go to United States and Canada. A few weeks ago, several Gujaratis with surnames `Patel’ and `Shah’, had forged their names ontheir passports as they feared that the US and Canadian authorities were reluctant to allow any more persons from the community to immigrate to the Land of Plenty.