The incident was reported at about 3 AM by a foreign airline counter at terminal-III who informed the CISF security personnel that two Toronto-bound passengers went missing after handing over their check-in baggage but without taking their boarding passes. The ticket manager had raised some queries about their passports.
The Central Industrial Security Force teams on ground and on the CCTV monitoring task at the IGIA were immediately activated.
They said CISF sleuths tried to get the passengers deboarded from the Pune-bound plane but by then the flight had already hit the runway. The CISF then alerted their Pune unit who intercepted them as soon as they landed.
Meanwhile, a bomb squad was called in at IGIA to scan the two baggages that the two, booked as Amit R Chavan and Sheetal A Chavan, had left at the airline counter.
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Sensing trouble they slipped into the domestic terminal and got flight tickets to Pune.
"The two were later identified as Ahmedabad based K Patel and M Patel and they were handed over to immigration authorities in Delhi. It looks to be a suspected case of human trafficking," they said.
It was later disclosed that an agent who had allegedly helped the duo in preparing fake international travel papers was present in the terminal area on the pretext of taking a flight but later got himself offloaded citing health issues.