E-Paper
Six booked in ₹35 lakh immigration fraud
The accused have been identified as Raj Kumar, Charanjeet, Ali Khwaja, Satnam, Baljeet Kaur and Abbas Rashid, all agents
Police have booked six persons for alleged immigration fraud of ₹35 lakh.
The accused have been identified as Raj Kumar, Charanjeet, Ali Khwaja, Satnam, Baljeet Kaur and Abbas Rashid, all agents.
The FIR was lodged on the complaint of the victim’s mother Reshma Devi. In her complaint, she told the police that the accused lured them into sending their son to Germany with a work permit and also promised a good-paying job there. Instead of Europe their son was sent to Thailand where he was tortured and agents asked for more money to send him to Moscow. After her husband paid the money, Mukesh was sent to Moscow, where he was drugged and agents asked for more money, she added.
An FIR under sections 406 (criminal breach of trust) and 420 (cheating) of the Indian Penal Code was registered at Munak police station against the alleged accused.
The returnees recall the horror
Cigarette butts, hot iron rods, heated wood, matchsticks and knives – this is how donkers allegedly tortured cousins--Sunny, 24, and Mukesh, 21, while they were kidnapped and detained for days in Russia.
Residents of Munak village in Karnal, nearly 25 kilometres away from district headquarters, both returned home on Thursday after getting bail from the Russian jail, where they were confined reportedly for not joining the army in the fight against Ukraine in the ongoing war.
Talking about his experience, Mukesh said they were fraudulently sent to Thailand instead of Germany in September last year.
“Here, the agents started torturing us claiming that my family had paid for only till Thailand and asked for more money that my father paid. Then, I was sent to Moscow from where we were taken to some forests and handed over to the donkers to stay in camps set up by fraudulent immigration agents,” he said.
Sunny said his skin was burnt several times using cigarette butts, hot iron rods along with some other methods of torture.
Mukesh further said, “Then the Russian authorities arrived and forced four of us to join the army, threatening a 10-year term in jail in case of non-compliance. We refused and were sent to jail, where I spent two months including 12 days at a hospital, until somehow my father contacted a local lawyer and bailed me out.”
They further alleged that two of their friends - one from Pakistan and the other from Punjab’s Gurdaspur were also jailed with them but they are now unaware of their whereabouts.
“More than 200 men, mostly from Pakistan or India particularly from Haryana and Punjab are trapped in camps set up by the illegal agents from both these countries,” Mukesh said, further revealing that they once stayed in the same camp with another native, Harsh.
Sunny said Harsh and six other Indian youth were forcibly sent to the Russia borders to fight with their enemy country.
Still trapped, Harsh release another video
Harsh Kumar from Karnal’s Sambhli village had released two SOS videos earlier this month with six of his fellows from Haryana and Punjab in army uniform, seeking the government’s help to return to India.
In a latest video, that Harsh sent to Hindustan Times on Saturday, he said, “It’s been nearly a month; there has been no response from the Indian government yet. We were on frontline for the last 10 days and came back for rest of two-three days. The situation is very dangerous and we believe if we are sent again in the war, our parents won’t be able to find our dead bodies.”
