Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/MANITOBA: Police in India have arrested three alleged black-market immigration agents as part of a case involving the death of four people near the United States border with Canada border in January 2022.
Chaitanya Mandlik, a senior police official in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad, said that the suspects were in police custody and had been charged with culpable homicide, human trafficking and criminal conspiracy.
Illegal immigration from Gujrat to US via Canada
The three men – identified as Yogesh Patel, Bhavesh Patel, and Dashrath Chaudhary – were also suspected of being involved in illegal immigration from the Indian state of Gujrat to the US via Canada, he added.
They were arrested in the cities of Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad between Sunday and Tuesday in connection to a case allegedly involving 11 illegal immigrants, including a family who froze to death last January while trying to cross into the US on foot.
The 11 individuals were taken to Toronto and then to Vancouver. Mandlik said the agents then left them in Winnipeg, in Manitoba province, leaving them to cross over the border on their own.
The dead bodies, including that of a three-year-old child, were found lying together in a frozen state in a field in Canada’s Manitoba, 12 meters away from the US border.
The family of four – Jagdish Patel, 39, Vaishaliben, 37, their daughter, Vihangi, 11 and son, Dharmik, 3 – were from Gujarat’s Dingucha village. Aspiring to move abroad for a better life, they walked for hours in -35C temperatures.
They got separated from the rest of the group during a blizzard before dying amid freezing temperatures near the Manitoba town of Emerson on January 19, 2022.
The young family had probably never experienced such low temperatures before. Even on its coldest day, the temperature at their home village in western India would not have dropped to within 10 degrees of freezing.
Their mysterious and highly tragic death half a world away was a shock to many and exposed the intense pressures and economic difficulties that may have led to tragedy.
