UP labourer sells wife’s gold for UAE trip, lands at airport with fake documents

MUMBAI: In a double whammy, a 31-year-old labourer from Uttar Pradesh who wanted to get a job abroad, first lost Rs 50,000, raised by selling wife’s ornaments, to a travel agent and then was arrested at the Mumbai airport with fake documents allegedly arranged by the agent. For the last one week, Ranjitkumar Rajbar has been behind bars in Mumbai, with no money to even pay for the bail amount. His family in Gazipur, UP, says they are also helpless, with no money to even come to Mumbai and get him out.

Rajbar was caught at the city airport on October 22 when he was about to fly to the UAE on a tourist visa. Immigration officials found Rajbar had an emigration check required (ECR) passport, which means he needed to get the certificate of protector of emigrants (POE). “When officials questioned Rajbar, he said he was travelling to Sharjah. Then they asked him to show the return tickets, only to find that he two of them—one for October 10 and other for October 30. Both tickets turned out to be forged. Later, he was handed over to us,” said an officer from Sahar police station.

Rajbar told the investigators that he had paid Rs 50,000 to two agents—Sunil Kumar and Dharmendra Kumar in Gazipur— and that it was they who had arranged for the visa and tickets. Rajbar’s lawyer Prabhakar Tripathi said: “The police should have booked the agents and made my client a witness.”

Now, Rajbar’s wife, Pujadevi, is clueless how to arrange another Rs60,000 for bailing him out from jail as all her ornaments have been already sold to pay the agents. “In fact we even do not know where he is currently lodged. We received a call from the court asking to arrange for Rs60,000 for getting him released on bail,” Pujadevi told TOI from UP on Monday.

Pujadevi said they are already in dire state, not having enough money for food. “We are illiterate and unaware of what’s in the ticket and visa. We know nothing about the POE rule, which the agents never informed us about,” Rajbar’s brother-in-law Shyamprasad said.