Nepali football coach found at KIA with Indian passport

A 32-year-old Nepalese national with an Indian passport was nabbed at the Kempegowda International Airport on January 15.

Alert immigration officials checked Lakshman Bhattarai’s previous travel records and found that he had used his Nepal citizenship ID to travel to Nepal in 2015.

When they confronted him with this detail, he confessed to them that he wanted to fly to European countries for work. Due to some reasons, he could not manage to get a visa. He then applied for identity documents in India and submitted the same with an application for a passport at the Bengaluru passport Seva Kendra in 2017 and got his passport done.

Bhattarai confessed that before taking a flight to Europe, he wanted to check whether he could fly using the Indian passport and that was when he was caught, an official said.

Bhattarai told officials that he came to India in 2006 to study, but dropped out of college. As he was interested in football, he joined various clubs and played until 2015 before quitting due to a leg injury in one of the matches.

In 2016, he joined as a coach for a football club in JP Nagar and wanted to shift to Europe to try his luck as a football coach there, the official added.

He was handed over to the airport police, who booked him for cheating and also under various sections under the Passport Act. The police produced him before a magistrate who remanded him in judicial custody.