Ahmedabad, 21 January 2012

Ahmedbad’s Sawan Rajnikant Trivedi and Guramrit Pal are among four arrested in human trafficking racket by Delhi police.

This has exposed a big racket of taking the youths of Gujarat illegally to America via Guatemala.

The serious aspect of this expose is that according to Delhi police a number of youths from Gujarat have lost their lives in Guatemala and other places in a bid to illegally sneak into the US.

The racket was unearthed after Delhi police seized 105 passports from a bag at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi on January 2 this year.

A number of youths from Gujarat have lost their lives in Guatemala and other places in a bid to illegally sneak into the US, according to Delhi Police, which has been on trail of human traffickers following the seizure of 105 passports from a bag of Ahmedabad’s Ranip based Sawan Rajnikant Trivedi at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi on January 2 this year. Of the 105 passports seized, 84 were issued from Regional Passport Office in Ahmedabad while one was issued from Surat. Trivedi was arrested, and after investigation exposed a major human trafficking racket.

Trivedi, who was kidnapped for ransom in 2006 in London, had allegedly sneaked in the baggage from Guatemala to Delhi via Istanbul. An MBA from Thames Velly University, London, he made a fortune despite coming from a lower middle class family. His father is a driver.

Reddy from Hyderabad financed the agents from Gujarat. “Reddy has visited Guatemala and other areas and studied how human trafficking takes place there. He knows five agents in Gujarat, while he was in touch with at least four other agents in Mumbai and even Andhra Pradesh. The accused Gurmeet Pal alias Pali is a farmer’s son and an international Kabbadi player. He was posted at Guatemala for two years and hobnobbed with the local groups to helps his “clients” cross the border,” said DCP (IGI airport) R A Sanjeev.

Trivedi used to charge around `6-12 lakh for facilitating entry into Guatemala and `25-30 lakh for the U.S. The youngsters, mostly from Punjab and Gujarat – between the age group of 18-30 years – were available in hordes to strike deals with the agents.

The police are yet to arrest the 11 others involved from different parts of the country and have issued non-bailable warrants against them. The gang also facilitated entry into Nicaragua, Brazil and other countries, it is claimed.

The young illegal immigrants travelled to New Delhi from their home states and then boarded flights to Guatemala via Istanbul on valid passports and the agents used to get their entry to the country through visa on arrival.

In Guatemala, the Indian agents handed over the passengers to Spanish and Mexican groups who then helped them cross over to the U.S.

However, the agents retained the passports of all their customers and came back to India to extort pending payments from the families. After receiving the payments, they handed over the passports to family members who sent them back to their relative in the U.S.

Once inside the U.S., the illegal immigrants would fan out across the country, often relying on relatives and acquaintances already there to arrange jobs and housing.

‘The agents used to bear the expenses of advocates or attorneys if there was any risk in the U.S.,’deputy commissioner of police R.A. Sanjeev said.

The police managed to identify all the accused after they scanned the 105 passports and found that one of the passport holders, Praveen Bhai Mohandas Patel, had come back to India from Guatemala on a scanned passport in 2011.

He was arrested in 2011 and his statement revealed the gang of agents active in Gujarat, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Punjab. Trivedi’s name also surfaced in the statement and that’s how the police managed to trace the rest of the accused.

According to police, most of the passengers sneaked into the US like this in 2010-11 and the fate of many is unknown to even their parents.

Also read: He dropped 29 U.S. crazy Gujaratis in Guatemala, and returned