60 foreigners detained for staying without visas

Greater Noida: Police on Wednesday conducted a campaign to check the travel documents of foreigners living in Greater Noida. In the four-hour-long operation, documents and permits of at least 320 people were examined, of whom 60 were found to be living on fake or expired visas. All of them were detained at the police lines in Surajpur.
Among the 60 foreigners detained, 19 were women. Of them, 35 had been staying in Alstonia Society in Surajpur, while the others were in Sector Sigma 3, Omicron 1 and Omaxe Palm Green Society in Dadri area.
“The checking drive was carried out on the basis of census provided to us by the local intelligence unit. Based on the data, we formed three squads, which included the SP (city), circle officers, inspectors and constables. The teams conducted raids on separate locations and found 32 men and 28 women living without verification,” Noida police chief Vaibhav Krishna said.
The checking drive comes within months of two foreigners being arrested from a Greater Noida house with 1,800kg of pseudoephedrine, the biggest such seizure of the chemical outside factory premises. Noida and Greater Noida, which houses several institutes and professional colleges, attact many students of foreign origin.
Many of them allegedly stay back on expired visas.
Police recovered 180 bottles of beer from the flats of foreigners who were checked for documents in Alstonia Society. Of the 35 foreigners staying there, seven were found to be carrying visas that had expired while 26 had no documents at all. “ In Sector Sigma 3, we found 42 beer bottles and 3.5kg weed from one man who has already been to jail for peddling drugs in Delhi. We also recovered 114 SIM cards along with small devices that appear to be mobile phones. We suspect these SIM cards were being used for some illegal activity. We have informed central security agencies about the recovery and have asked them to investigate the SIM cards and devices,” Krishna said.
The officer said those detained belong to Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Ivory Coast and Angola. "We had been receiving numerous complaints regarding these immigrants living illegally in Greater Noida. We are in talks with the respective embassies and security agencies," said Krishna. He added that the role of police would also be probed for allowing foreigners to live in the city without registration.
Charles Kennedy, president of the Nigerian Citizen Welfare Association, said its members would cooperate the police. “The liquor recovered was stored for consumption. I was called by police at most of the locations from where they detained foreigners. Most of them have proper authentication and the police are still in the process of checking their documents. We are cooperating them in the investigation. It would be unfair to call them criminals before a proper course of investigation,” said Charles.