Evacuation of Indians from Doha postponed: Official

Speaking to the news agency, a top airport official here said the flight was to travel to Doha from Kozhikode around 1 pm and land here around 10.45 pm.

“There have been some technical issues as Doha has not given the permission for this flight to land. What we are given to understand is that this flight has been called off. Now it will have to operate under a new schedule. We were fully ready to receive the flight later in the night,” said the official who did not wish to be identified.

According to reports, about 50 passengers booked to travel from Doha had reached the airport there.

Kerala will thus see only one flight on Sunday, and that is the one bringing stranded Indians from Malaysia to Kochi in the night. Meanwhile, the Thiruvananthapuram District Collector told the media here that this flight has now been rescheduled for Tuesday.

Seven people, including three who had arrivedfrom Abu Dhabi on May 7 in the repatriation flight from the gulf sector, tested positive for COVID-19 on Sunday, taking the total number of people under treatment for the virus in Kerala to 20.

With this, five foreign returnees who reached the state from the gulf as part of the centre’s ‘Vande Bharat’ mission to bring back stranded Indians and expatriates in other countries,especially the GCC, due to the COVID-19 lockdown, has reached five. Days after the state had declared that it had flattened the curve, new cases were being reported.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, had on Saturday said the new cases were a “warning to those coming back from abroad and for other states to beon the alert.” Ofthe seven fresh cases, three are from Wayanad, two from Thrissur and one each from Ernakulam and Malappuram, State Health Minister K K Shailaja said.

Five pilots, an engineer and a technician of Air India have tested positive for coronavirus, sources in the airline have told to media. The pilots were detected after 77 pilots of the airline were tested for the virus yesterday on priority basis. None of the infected pilots have any symptoms and they have been advised home quarantine, the sources said. All of them are from Mumbai. All five affected pilots have been operating Boeing 787 Dreamliners. The last time any of them operated a flight was on April 20.

‘INS Magar’, the second Indian Naval ship to reach Maldives for evacuation of Indian citizens, has departed from Male for Kochi this evening carrying 202 people including 24 women and a man from Tamil Nadu with a fractured leg. Indian Navy, as part of Operation Samudra Setu under the Vande Bharat Mission, has deployed ‘INS Magar’ for the second phase of repatriation of Indian citizens from Maldives. In the first phase, ‘INS Jalashwa’ had evacuated a total of 698 Indian nationals stranded in the Maldives on 10 May 20.