AGARTALA, May 15 (TIWN): Putting a preliminary crack down to the most talked about air ticket black marketing case here in the capital city Agartala, the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) had recently lodges an FIR against 15 and other air travel agencies with the West Police Station. Talking to TIWN on Thursday SP CID Sanjay Roy said, “We have concluded our long term enquiry to the air ticket black marketing case recently and later we lodged an FIR with the West PS on Wednesday against some air travel agencies.” Adding to that Ray said, “The case has been revealed as a cognizable offence.” He said “Case been registered against 15 travel agencies of the city along with others under Section 468 IPC, 471 IPC and 420 IPC.” He also said that some most popular and commonly known reputed travel agencies like “Sky Line”, “Hindustan Travel Agency” are found involved in black marketing of air tickets. Further enquiry to the case has been handed over with a 5 members CID team now, Roy said.

However later briefing the entire case Roy said that after conducting a preliminary enquiry to the case CID had seized as many as necessary documents from the travel agencies of the city. “We had also conducted a field enquiry to the case and we found it to be a cognizable offence and lodged FIR with West Police Station on Wednesday,” Roy said.

Following reports of bulk booking of air tickets by a section of travel agencies, our officials have raided offices of six agencies in the past two days and collected all relevant documents. None has been arrested yet.

Previous year, eight airlines, including the Jet Airways, stopped their operations on the Agartala-Kolkata-Guwahati routes causing enormous problems for the Kolkata, Guwahati and Agartala-bound passengers.

As a result several hundred passengers, including patients and job seekers, have been stranded in Agartala, Kolkata and Guwahati in view of the crisis of air tickets.

Later it was learnt that the travel agencies of Agartala were taking advantage of the situation by booking air tickets in fake names and selling these to passengers at exorbitantly high prices.

Earlier, the CID of Tripura police has collected passenger list of Indigo airline from December 1 to December 29 of Agartala-Kolkata route from Agartala airport counter of Indigo airline office. CID had also enquired the passenger lists of the Air India and Spice jet airlines and about the group ticketing systems of airlines.