The Hindu : New Delhi News : Human traffickers still at large

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Apr 01, 2005

New Delhi

New Delhi

Human traffickers still at large

By Devesh K. Pandey

NEW DELHI, MARCH 31. Even as efforts are being made to track down the human traffickers operating from here and outside the country, who are wanted by the Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport police, there are over 1,200 such elements who are still at large.

Of these wanted people, over 120 are suspected to be operating from countries like Britain, Canada, Thailand, CIS countries and African countries. The Airport police have already opened Look Out Circulars (LOCs) in their names, apart from 200 others, to alert airports and other entry-exit ports across the country. While most of the accused are of Indian origin, some are from African countries, Sri Lanka and also from Bangladesh.

The Delhi police have sent a list of these human traffickers to Interpol for assistance in tracking them down and it is learnt that in a few cases, Interpol has already initiated investigations. The opening of LOCs also resulted in the arrest of 12 human traffickers from airports at Delhi, Amritsar, Kolkata, Ahmedabad and other places, in the past six months.

One of the most prized arrests was made through LOC when an alleged notorious human trafficker, Nirmal Singh Dhaliwal, who possessed a Canadian passport, was caught at the IGI Airport in November last. Interestingly, Dhaliwal -- who was allegedly active in the human trafficking business for the past several years -- had come to attend the launching party of a film he had financed. His arrest also exposed the involvement of an immigration official and two Delhi police personnel in the human trafficking network.

The records reveal that of those operating from inside the country, 650 are from Punjab, 160 from Gujarat, 80 from Tamil Nadu, over 45 from Haryana and nearly 110 from the Capital. To track them down, the police had last year set up a special team which was supposed to visit places on regular intervals on specific inputs. This year, the Airport police have arrested 18 of the 45 proclaimed offenders who were reported missing for the past three years.

Most of those in the list of wanted human traffickers are proclaimed offenders, who jumped bails and paroles and then vanished from the scene. Surprisingly, the number of such proclaimed offenders kept increasing over the years and it was only about a year ago that the Delhi police started taking interest in the issue, which is understood to be one of the biggest forms of organised crime in the world.

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