Businessman replaces passport pages to hide Thailand trip from wife

Satara businessman arrested for replacing passport pages to hide foreign trips from wife, apprehended at Mumbai airport while trying to fly to Bangkok.

Mumbai: A 33-year-old Satara-based businessman was arrested by the Sahar police on Saturday for allegedly replacing the stamped pages from his passport with blank pages, purportedly to hide his foreign trips from his wife.

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According to the police, the accused, Tushar Pawar, had gone to Thailand several times in 2023 and 2024 with his friends and had not told his wife about it. Therefore, he removed the relevant stamped pages of his passport and replaced them with blank pages. He was apprehended at Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport while he was attempting to fly to Bangkok again.

On Friday, Aastha Mithal, an Immigration Bureau official posted at CSMIA, noted the changes in the accused’s passport while checking details of passengers travelling abroad.

“Tushar Pawar presented his passport to the immigration officer for travelling to Bangkok, capital of Thailand, on AI-330. When the officer went through his passport, she found 12 pages of his passport were tampered with and new pages were inserted in the place of the original ones,” said a police officer from Sahar police station.

Pawar could not give her satisfactory answers as to why he had done so. She then took him to wing in-charge, Prashant Sawant, who along with the duty officer questioned Pawar about why the pages were destroyed.

“He then told them that he had gone to Thailand with his friends in 2023 and 2024 and had not told his wife anything about the visits. He had to hide the travel history from his wife, so he had inserted new pages in the passport. As the accused had illegally carried out the alterations in the passport and tried to travel to Bangkok, the authorities decided to register a case against him,” said the police officer.

A case has been registered against Pawar under section 318 (4) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for cheating and relevant sections of the Indian Passport Act, 1967.