A group of 330 Indian nationals evacuated from strife-torn Yemen reached Kochi by a special Air India flight on past Friday midnight.
“The flight has landed with 330 passengers on board,” Kerala Minister for Diaspora K.C. Joseph told PTI.
The flight landed at around 12.30 a.m.. The Minister along with several State government officials was at the airport to welcome the evacuees.
The Indian nationals, including nurses and workers, among others, reached home by the special AI flight, bringing an end to their more than a week-long ordeal.
They were part of over 650 Indian nationals who were brought to Djibouti from Sana'a early in the day.
Kerala government’s Non-Resident Keralites Affairs (Norka) cell is giving Rs. 2,000 each to the those who returned from Yemen at the airport besides providing them free transportation facilities to reach home.
This is the second landing of a plane carrying Indian nationals evacuated from Yemen at Kochi.
In the early hours on Thursday, an IAF plane carrying 168 Indian nationals evacuated from Yemen had landed at Kochi.
Earlier report by our Special Correspondent from Kochi:
An Air India flight carrying 330 Indians evacuated from Sana’a, capital of Yemen, landed in Kochi 0040 hours on Saturday.
The flight, which took off from Djibouti around 8 p.m. on Friday after India managed to fly two Air India aircraft from Muscat to Sana’a earlier in the day to bring back Indians stuck there, would head for Mumbai after the stopover, officials said.
It, however, remained unclear about the number of people disembarking at Kochi and if there would be evacuees bound for Mumbai.
Clueless about list Non-Resident Keralites Affairs officials were largely clueless about the list of passengers, but they said some 585 stranded Keralites had registered with their office and 206 had been brought back to the State on two previous flights earlier in the week to Kochi and Mumbai.
The Kerala State Road Transport Corporation had arranged five buses for the onward journey of evacuees deplaning at the Cochin International Airport. Hardly any relative of arriving evacuees could be spotted in front of the arrival terminal at the airport at the time of going to press, though.
Naval officials said two passenger vessels of the Shipping Corporation of India, m.v. Kavaratti and m.v. Coral , which had set sail from Kochi for Aden on March 30 to join the multi-agency evacuation mission, would enter “the piracy-ridden waters of the Gulf of Aden” on Saturday.
The destroyer INS Mumbai was sailing to Aden and the stealth frigate INS Tarkash was escorting the passenger vessels, they said.
