NRI woman robbed on way from Sahar airport

MUMBAI: JANUARY 14, 2005
TIMES NEWS NETWORK

An NRI on her way home from Sahar Airport was waylaid and robbed on Thursday. Olga Pereira, a retired executive in her mid-50s, arrived by a British Airways flight at 1 am and was making her way home when a Santro blocked the path of her car. Two men with choppers emerged, smashed her car windows, and fled with her luggage and Rs 3 lakh in cash and valuables. The crime took place a kilometre away from the airport.

Only last year, TOI had highlighted the danger of the stretch between the international airport and Mahim and the growing incidence of highway robberies here. Numerous tourists arriving by late-night flights have been robbed on this route either by cabbies or armed gangs. Police commissioner A N Roy had even deployed beat marshals for a round-the-clock patrol of the highway. On Thursday, however, there were no policemen on the airport route to rescue Pereira, who stumbled up to Sahar police station an hour later to register a complaint.

According to senior police officers, an average of four robberies take place on the airport-to-Mahim stretch every two months, and not every incident is reported. In many cases, foreign tourists are shunted from one police station to another when they go to lodge a complaint.

In the past, the underworld has also been been active in highway robberies, keeping a watch on foreign tourists and other passengers at the airport taxi stands and following them to a secluded spot before intercepting them.

The end of 2003 saw at least two major cases of tourists being robbed on the Western Express Highway near the international airport. A British national, Dipankumar Patel, who hired a taxi from Sahar to Ahmedabad, was robbed of US $4,000 by three unknown men near the Vakola flyover at around 4 am. The Vakola police arrested the taxi driver, but no further arrests were made. A few weeks before that, a 26-year-old Dutch researcher, Stephanie Koot, was robbed of cash and valuables on the highway near Vile Parle. The case remains unsolved.

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