E-Paper
600 Indians leave Lebanon by air
Two AI flights with Indian evacuees from Lebanon will reach India - Mumbai and Chennai - on Friday evening.
Two Air India flights with Indian evacuees from violence-hit Lebanon will reach India - Mumbai and Chennai - on Friday evening.
"Two aircrafts carrying around 600 Indians from Lebanon will reach today. One will go to Chennai and the other one will land in Mumbai," Overseas Indian Affairs Minister Vayalar Ravi said.
Ravi, who has been has left for Chennai. "The flights were expected to arrive at 9:30 pm," he said.
"The government is doing their best for our citizens in the troubled region. Both the Indian envoys in Beirut and Cyprus are helping out those who want to return to India," Ravi said.
In one of its largest ever-overseas civilian evacuation operation named as 'Operation Sukoon' Indian Navy has sent four warships - the INS Mumbai, INS Betwa, INS Brahmaputra and auxiliary tanker INS Shakti - to transport the Indian citizen from the trouble-hit regions to the refugee camps in Larnaca, Cyprus.
The first of the four ships, INS Mumbai, which had docked at the Beirut port on Thursday, has already reached around 700 Indians to Larnaca in Cyprus, around 200 kilometres from the Lebanon capital.
The four ships could carry a total of 1,000-1,200 people.
There are an estimated 12,000 Indians living in Lebanon. Over 100 Indians have already been evacuated overland to Syria's capital Damascus.
