New Delhi: An Indian Air Force C-17 plane with 168 evacuees, including 107 Indians, arrived in India from Kabul, on Sunday morning. On board were two Afghan Sikh MPs with their families.
The IAF plane landed at the Hindon Air Force station in Ghaziabad.
Afghan MPs Narender Singh Khalsa and Anarkali Kaur Honaryar were on board with their families.
Both the MPs, while speaking to the Indian media, got very emotional.
Narender Singh Khalsa, wiping his tears, said, “Everything that we had built over the years has ended. Everything has been snatched from us. It’s over now.”
The IAF plane carrying the evacuees took off from Kabul at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday.
An Afghan Sikh said the situation was bad in Afghanistan, and expressed gratitude to the Indian government for evacuating them.
Most of the evacuees were reportedly part of the batch that was detained by the Taliban outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport for a brief while on Saturday. They were questioned and their passports seized. But later, they were allowed to proceed to the airport.
Separately, another batch of Indian nationals, arrived from Tajikistan on board an Air India flight on Sunday. The 87 Indian evacuees were first flown to Tajikistan on transit from Kabul before being flown back to India.
Two Nepalese nationals were also among those evacuated.
The passengers had been evacuated from Kabul by an Indian Air Force plane.
In another operation, 135 Indians who were evacuated from Kabul and taken to Doha on transit were repatriated to India on Saturday night, the Indian embassy in Doha said,
The embassy said that they provided consular and logistic assistance to the Indians to ensure their safe return to India, and thanked the Qatar authorities and others for helping in the evacuation.
