Indian MP accused in Canada people smuggling plot

INDIA: An Indian MP has been arrested for trying to smuggle a woman and a teenage boy to Canada using his family's passports, police said on Thursday, the latest in a string of crime scandals to blight the country's politicians.

Police said they were investigating whether Babubhai Katara, a member of the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), was involved in a scam to sneak the pair out in return for cash. Katara was caught on Wednesday at New Delhi's Indira Gandhi International airport along with the woman and the boy seeking to travel on a Toronto-bound Air India plane.

They were arrested after staff noticed that passport photographs did not match the faces of the woman and the youth.

The trio have been "charged with cheating by impersonation, forgery for cheating, using forged documents, misuse of passports and criminal conspiracy," police spokesman Rajan Bhagat told AFP.

Katara was also swiftly suspended by the BJP.

The scandal, which was front-page news in Indian newspapers, was the latest to embroil the country's political classes. A number of politicians face criminal charges but their cases have still to be resolved under India's slow-moving justice system.

A Delhi court ordered Katara on Thursday to spend 10 days in police custody and sent the teenager to a remand home, pending further inquiries. The woman from the northern state of Punjab was given four days in police custody.

The police told the court they needed to take Katara to various places in Punjab to find out the extent of his alleged involvement in human trafficking.

Punjab, despite being India's wealthiest state, is the source of much of the country's illegal immigration to the West as people there have the means to pay smugglers.

An investigating officer told the court that police had recovered passports belonging to three family members from the MP's possession, the Press Trust of India reported. The court was also told that the 46-year-old MP had earlier taken another person on his wife's passport to a foreign country.

The media quoted the woman's relatives as saying they had agreed to pay three million rupees (71,000 dollars) to a travel agent to send her to Toronto.

"(Travel agent) Joginder told me they can take my daughter-in-law out of the country. I was worried but he assured me that he would get her a valid visa," Charanjeet Kaur told India's CNN-IBN television news network.

"We didn't know how they were taking her. We don't know who the man is, I just came to know he's an MP," the woman's mother-in-law told the network in Punjab. Other media reports said Katara had used his wife and son's passports to carry out the deception.

The mix of crime and politics is not uncommon in Indian politics.

New Delhi, Friday, AFP