A special Air India Boeing 747 with the capacity of 360 passengers, and an Airbus 330 with a capacity of 280, was sent to Tripoli to pick up stranded Indians.
India on Saturday began evacuating its nationals stranded in troubled Libya with the first batch being airlifted by a 280-seater Air India plane from Tripoli.
A special Air India Boeing 747 with the capacity of 360 passengers, and an Airbus 330 with a capacity of 280, was sent to Tripoli to pick up stranded Indians.
Besides, two Naval ships INS Jalashwa, and INS Mysore, left from Mumbai on Saturday morning and will reach Libya in 12 days.
Both the ships are equipped with medical facilities. They are carrying helicopters and a contingent of marine special forces personnel. An Indian Air Force IL 76 aircraft is also kept on standby to meet additional transportation requirements wherever needed.
Also, two more passenger ships with a capacity of 1200 and 1600 each, presently in the Mediterranean, too have been pressed into service. The evacuation will be free of cost. Meanwhile, the government has deployed additional staff at its Embassy in Tripoli to facilitate paper work for travel. Around 150 Indian nationals from the Tobruk (Libya) are likely to travel by road to Salloum which shares a border with Egypt. They are likely to cross over in two batches on Saturday and Monday. At Salloum they would be escorted out by Indian embassy personnel from Cairo. The Egyptian government has agreed to facilitate visas on arrival of Indians at the border. Arrangements are also being made for their travel onwards by road to Cairo and next by air to India.
In July 2006, the Indian Navy had similarly evacuated over 2500 Indians, PIOs and some foreign nationals from Lebanon following the war between Israel and the Hezbollah. INS Jalashwa, a Landing Platform Dock type of amphibious platform is particularly designed for sea lift missions and is also capable of undertaking humanitarian missions. INS Mysore, is a potent destroyer of the Delhi class.
Scotia Prince, another chartered ship, was scheduled to depart for Benghazi (Libya) from Port Said (Egypt) on Saturday at 2000 hrs and is likely to arrive at its destination by February 28. The ship has a capacity of 1,200 passengers.
There are around 18,000 Indians in Libya and the government is concerned about their well-being in view of the deteriorating situation in the country.
The external affairs ministry said it has positioned additional personnel at the Indian embassy in Tripoli to help in the process. “Our mission has worked tirelessly to get this flight organised,” foreign secretary Nirupama Rao said on Twitter.
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