The helpless couple is now approaching the External Affairs Ministry in New Delhi to highlight their harrowing experience.
Agriculturist K N Ashok Kumar (59) from Hassan and his 45-year old wife Meenakshi Amma set out on August 25 from BIA airport planning for a one-month stay at Tampere in Finland with their son. Plans went for a toss the minute they landed at Paris Charles De Gaulle airport, from where they had to take a connecting flight to Finland.
The minute they landed at the airport, security officials demanded the invitation letter sent to the parents by their son, K A Darpan, employed as a software engineer at Nokia in Finland. “As we had already handed over the letter to the embassy at Bangalore to procure the visa, we expressed our helplessness to give it,” explains Ashok Kumar.
The couple jotted down the mobile number and e-mail address of their son on a paper and handed it. However, the officials rudely tore them up and threw it away. Ashok Kumar then called up his son to explain their plight and urged him to send all documents by fax, which Darpan did so immediately. “They then snatched my mobile and bundled me and my wife to a big prison-like building inside the airport. We were dumped in a room,” the agriculturist said.
Tickets advanced
The couple were asked to sign something written in French. “Though we were given proper food, they kept ordering us to shut up when we attempted to say something,” he added. “The next morning, police came to our room at 6.45 am gave us tickets to visit Bangalore and escorted us till the gate on a return flight to the City,” Kumar added. “The return tickets we had booked for September 25 had been advanced by nearly a month to August 26 and we were sent back. We understood later that the signature was in connection with the tickets,” he added.
Before boarding the flight, the couple had asked for their mobile. “A few officials joked that the phone had been returned to us. They threw all the contents of our luggages out under the guise of checking for it and finally returned our mobile,” fumed Ashok Kumar.
The detention was thoroughly illogical. “If they had any doubts of us bearing the H1N1 virus they should have conducted tests. But no tests were done in that connection,” he observed.
One explanation Darpan was given was that the duo were in possession of merely 250 Euros and could have been mistaken to be very poor to visit Finland.
