Airline holds UK-bound NRI passengers 'to ransom'
Angry passengers travelling by a private airline from Amritsar to Birmingham via Vienna, most of them of Indian-origin were forced to cough up 20,000 pounds over the weekend when the airline could not afford to meet the fuel and other costs of the second leg of the journey.
Irate passengers reached Birmingham after a harrowing time at Vienna, where they were allegedly 'held to ransom' for six hours by the Austria-based Comtel Air.
The passengers had already paid for their tickets, and were due to start the Vienna-Birmingham leg of the flight, reports from Birmingham said.
More than 180 passengers were told to disembark because the airline had 'ran out of cash to fund the last leg of the trip'.
The passengers refused to get off the plane and were told that the flight would only return to Birmingham if 23,400 euros (20,000 pounds) was handed over.
The Austrian police were called to the aircraft during the six-hour stand-off, which only ended when passengers were escorted to cash point machines. Many elderly and young passengers did not have any money, and had to borrow from others.
The passengers were told that they and their luggage would be removed from the plane if they did not pay up. More than 600 people on four different flights are thought to have been embroiled in the fiasco which started in Amritsar at the weekend.
The Birmingham-Amritsar section is a popular one due to the large population of Punjab origin living in Birmingham and other towns of the West Midlands. Gurhej Kaur, a blind 80-year-old from Handsworth Wood, was one of the passengers who spent more than 15 hours on the plane while her medication was in the hold.
Her 34-year-old relative, Dalvinder Batra, from Oldbury, told the media in Birmingham: "It is absolutely disgusting. There are still people stuck out there. We have been told that the company has gone bust."
Tarlochan Singh, 57, from Wolverhampton, said: "Nobody has told us anything. They wanted all the money in cash. Everyone was furious, that is why we had the sit-in. We spent more than six hours in Vienna."
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