TNN
Beijing, Jul 14: Nearly 150 Indian medical students are stranded in airports and other places in China after discovering that the air tickets they bought were fakes. At least one of the students has filed a case with the Beijing police against the main travel agent, who is a Bangladeshi national. ( Watch )
Two airlines, Emirates and Malaysian, have refused to recognise the e-tickets supplied by the agent when they tried to board the aircrafts on different days between June 29 and July 11.
The travel agent, Mohmmed Jabbar Miyan, operated through a network of students in medical colleges who acted as his sub-agents. One of these sub-agents, Sumeet, on Sunday filed a case of cheating against Mohmmed Jabbar Miyan with the Beijing police. Miyan, who also goes by the name of Farooq among the students, is believed to have vanished from the scene.
Officials at the Indian Embassy in Beijing have taken up the matter with the Bangladeshi Embassy and advised the students to report the full details of the case to the police, sources said.
"I believed Mohmmed Miyan because he initially gave me genuine tickets. I did not expect he would cheat me in such a terrible manner." Sumeet told TNN after filing the case with the police on Sunday. The police showed him a bunch of 10 photographs and asked Sumeet to identify the travel agent. Miyan's picture was among those with the police, Sumeet said.
A group of 30 students waited at the Pudong airport in Shanghai on Sunday evening hoping to catch some other flight to destinations in India. The Emirates airways refused to accept the e-tickets held by them. The students are now hoping to get seats in an Air India flight connecting New Delhi and Mumbai after buying fresh tickets.
"We are trying to accommodate as many students as we can although our flights are fully booked these days. These students have been taken for a ride by some bad elements," Air India's country manager Rahul Jain said.
Students defrauded belong to several universities like Nanjing, Suzhou and Chong Qing that are separated by hundreds of kilometres. But the network of student agents fed into Miyan, who is based in Beijing.
"We were offered tickets at 4,400 yuan, which is quite cheap as compared to tickets sold in the market. This is why we bought it through student-agents," Mohmmed Nabeel Ahmed, a Nanjing University student said speaking on phone from the Pudong airport. Nanjing students paid the money to a sub-agent, Afzal Ahmed, who then passed on the money to Sumeet, he said.
Sumeet is apparently one of the student sub-agents and there could be several others working for Miyan in different medical colleges across China. More than 6,000 Indian students study medicine in China. It is not clear if there are other operators selling fake tickets to Indian students.
Sumeet said he had paid Miyan money for 74 Emirates airlines tickets to Hyderabad and another 40 tickets to Delhi. Some of the tickets turned out to be genuine, but most of them have turned out to be fakes.
Air India's Jain said Indian students have suffered this kind of ticket fraud in China from time to time. He has been contacted by Indian students saying they are being offered tickets at half the market price of tickets of certain airlines. But it has never happened in the case of Air India tickets, he said.