New Delhi, September 10: It seems European airports don’t learn from their mistakes.
A month after a Bangalore couple was mistakenly harassed and deported from the Paris airport, an Indian student faced harassment at two European airports.
A computer science student from California State University, Fresno, Inder Singh, 30, was rushing to India to attend his mother’s last rites.
Singh was forced to spend nearly a couple of thousand euros for fresh tickets and penalties before being allowed to travel.
His fault: He did not have a transit visa for two airports in Europe and no one told him he needed one. Singh said: “I had booked tickets online and was given boarding passes for my connecting flights on Air France and Finnair in San Francisco on August 14. But I was stopped in Paris, during a connecting flight to Helsinki, and was asked for a transit visa.” Singh showed the officer his boarding passes. “He took me to the Air France counter and then to the police room. There I was kept waiting and, as a result, missed my flight,” he said.
The officers told him that he would have to be deported to San Francisco. “I told them that I had to reach home urgently. They relented but said they did not have any flight till the next day. But that would have been too late. Finally, they agreed to give me a new ticket for the evening flight on August 15 after I paid a penalty of €154 (Rs 10,869),” Singh said.
He was routed through Heathrow, London, and managed to arrive in New Delhi more than seven hours late. His mother’s cremation had to be delayed and his father, Jaganmohan Singh, fell ill with worry.
But that was not the end of Singh’s nightmare. His return flight was from New Delhi to Zurich on Air India (operated by SWISS).
He went to the French visa facilitation centre in Delhi, and then to SWISS to confirm whether he needed a transit visa.
The SWISS officials gave him a letter stating that he did not need a transit visa.
“SWISS people said since I had a valid US student visa, I did not need a transit visa.
They also stated in the letter that whatever happened on my way to Delhi should have never happened,” Singh said.
However, Singh was again hauled up at the Zurich airport. He had to transit to an Air France flight to Paris, and from there take a connecting flight to San Francisco.
“The security police at the plane’s exit stopped me. I showed them the letter from the embassy but they said the information in the letter was wrong,” Singh recounted. The police told Singh he had only two options – he could return to India or buy a new ticket on SWISS for Los Angeles.
“I wanted to cancel the Air France tickets and requested the SWISS counter if they could connect me to Air France. But they never did,” he stated. Singh had to shell out nearly 1,500 Swiss francs from his fee money for the fresh ticket.
Regarding Singh’s ordeal, a travel agent said: “If a person travels through just one Schengan visa point in Europe, he doesn’t need a transit visa, but if he travels through two points (like Paris and Helsinki or Zurich and Paris), he needs one.” Agents, however, said such decisions on transit visa were taken by individual airlines and were quite arbitrary. They also admitted that these rules should have been made clear to Singh. No one had an explanation for the letter that the Swiss visa facilitation centre had given.
The French embassy in New Delhi said: “Because of increasing illegal immigration attempts and security concerns, strict regulations are in force at the entry of the French territory as well as in all the 24 Schengen states. The embassy is taking the report seriously and has requested additional information from relevant authorities in Paris.”
–Agencies