The state police of Punjab and Gujarat are perusing the list of 300 Indians on board Legend Airways, the charter flight that was sequestered in France on suspicions of human trafficking.
Gurpreet Singh, Rachhpal Singh, Dhruv Arora, Joliben, Govindbhai, Amandeep Singh, Gurmeet Kaur are some of the names being scanned by the police among the list of 300 Indians who were onboard the flight.
The plane that took off from UAE on December 22 was originally destined for Nicaragua but landed at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai on December 26. The flight was grounded at the Vatry airport by the French authorities after they received a tip-off of an alleged human trafficking racket.
Almost 80 per cent of the passengers are from Punjab and Haryana and the second largest batch is from Gujarat.
The mysterious case may be handed over to the CBI if initial probe towards a transnational human trafficking syndicate. The CBI is the nodal agency for investigating human trafficking-related cases and of late, has been handling several cases of Punjab-based travel agents colluding with trans-national networks for luring Indians, resulting in many of them going missing from Punjab, including minors.
The problem is humongous, said government sources, pointing out that various agencies like the Ministry of External Affairs, Immigration and Emigration Departments as well as Interpol have been roped in at various stages without much headway.
But before the CBI steps in, the Indian agencies have to establish the motive of the flight after gathering information from their counterparts abroad. They will also have to examine the travel documents of the passengers, many of them valid ones, and investigate the purpose behind the flight of Indians to foreign soils.
"There is suspicion that it could be related to human trafficking but we need to investigate further to determine the exact reasons for their travel and the key persons who were involved in organising the flight," said a senior official. Legend Airlines has denied any knowledge of the purpose for which the chartered flight was hired.
The list of passengers includes 18 women and 11 minors – eight months to ten years- and women as old as 50 years to 14 years. There were three Nepali passengers on board as well- Yubraj Paudel, Basant Oli and Shishir making the total count 303. Out of these, 25 sought asylum from French authorities, two were separately produced before the French court by the police and placed on assisted witness status, leaving 276 passengers who were sent back to India.
Upon their landing, the Mumbai police swung into action alongside immigration authorities to verify the travel documents of the passengers. Teams of the Intelligence Bureau and Central Bureau of Investigation have quizzed the passengers in detail, sources said, before the travellers were sent to their homes.
At the onset, investigators said, it appears that the alleged human trafficking syndicate kingpins would have planned to take these passengers from Nicaragua to America and even Canada, as it is easier to get forged travel documents from Nicaragua. As more details stumble out, what would also not go unnoticed by the police forces, especially in Punjab, is whether any of these passengers were planning to cross over into Canada where the migration problem has been compounded by asylum seekers who enter from the porous US border prompting the local authorities to raise concern over the rising numbers.
The donkey route has been infamous in Punjab referring to illegal means for crossing a country’s borders with multiple stops in other countries.
However, the probe is in preliminary stages at the moment and it will be a long drawn-out process to corroborate the facts and initial claims about the exact purpose of the flight and the fate of the passengers who are back home.
