AHMEDABAD: Two women from North Gujarat were caught at the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport in Delhi while attempting to board a flight to Canada using stolen passports. The incident, which occurred on Jan 23, exposed a major human smuggling racket involving “lookalike” or “Humshakal” passports.
Sources privy to the development said that the women were set to stay in Canada before they found some convenient route to settle in the US, where the President Donald Trump is pushing out illegal immigrants. According to sources at the IGI Airport in New Delhi, a woman from Mehsana and another from Gandhinagar were intercepted by immigration officers at the IGI Airport before they could board their flights to Toronto.
Cops revealed that both women obtained stolen passports with valid Canadian visas from human smugglers operating outside the airport premises. The woman from Mehsana, 21, was caught using a passport belonging to a Mumbai-based artist. Upon questioning, she initially claimed to be a Mumbai resident travelling with her legal documents.
However, immigration officials grew suspicious and conducted further verification, which revealed her true identity as a resident of Gujarat. The passport she was carrying was found to be stolen, prompting authorities to launch a detailed investigation into the matter.
She later admitted to acquiring the passport from human smugglers identified as Monu from Delhi and one Bhavesh Mama. According to sources, these agents provided her with a passport containing a valid Canadian visa stamp outside the IGI airport premises. Similarly, the woman from Gandhinagar, 32, was caught attempting to travel on a passport belonging to a hockey player from Ludhiana, Punjab.
During interrogation, she disclosed that she received the passport from an agent known as Jasdeep Tiger, a resident of Shahbad in Delhi. Investigations revealed that the passport, which already had a Canadian visa, was handed over to her just outside the airport. By the time immigration officials detected the fraud, she had obtained a boarding pass for her flight to Toronto.
Cops believe this case is part of a larger scam where human smugglers provide stolen or forged passports to individuals desperate to travel abroad. The key to the fraud is ensuring that the passport holder closely resembles the individual using it, allowing them to bypass security checks. The IGI airport police have booked both women under charges of cheating and forgery as per the provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) and the Passport Act.