Eight persons including six women were held at Sri Lanka’s Bandaranaike International Airport (BIA) over the weekend, as they could not prove their true intention of travel to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), officials said on Wednesday.
They said the two male suspects were later identified as human traffickers who were attempting to send the women to the UAE on tourist visas when their true intention was to seek employment in that desert kingdom.
The group was stopped at passport control at the airport and later handed over to the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) of the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment.
Thousands of Sri Lankans are known to have been trafficked through the BIA to the UAE and other countries on tourist visas where they later seek employment in the unskilled sector, while some even end up as sex workers.
The SIU was set up some two months ago in a bid to curb such activities and during this period an undisclosed number of persons have been turned back owing to suspicious reasons.
The SIU is made up of a mixed bag of officials that include State Intelligence sleuths, police and foreign employment officials among others.
Meanwhile a female Iranian passenger who had entered Sri Lanka on a forged Austrian passport was nabbed by the Immigration and Emigration Department officials, while she was attempting to leave the country with the same passport on Wednesday.
The 53-year-old female was apprehended at the BIA Departure Terminal shortly before she was about to board an Indian Airlines flight to India, according to officials.
The woman who had arrived in the country on November 8 had tried to leave for India today with an Indian visa obtained from Colombo endorsed on her passport.
The authorities have also found out that the woman had left Tehran with her genuine Iranian passport for travel to Dubai prior to her arrival in Sri Lanka.
