Ahmedabad: The four-member Gujarati family frozen to death on the US-Canada border on Thursday belonged to Dingucha village in North Gujarat’s Kalol tehsil in Gandhinagar district, the same village where their large contingent similarly chasing the American dream belonged.
Official sources said the four persons have been identified as Jagdish Baldevbhai Patel, his wife Vaishali Patel, daughter Gopi, aged 10, and three-year-old son Dharmik.
In what has emerged as a global human smuggling racket, the four were part of a large group of Gujaratis from Dingucha village being smuggled into the US from Canada. All of them had stayed in Winnipeg for some months before they could be infiltrated into the US.
Sources in the village disclosed that besides Jagdish Patel, members of at least another four families from that group were missing and the villagers are trying to establish contact with them.
“We have sent an email to the Ministry of External Affairs for details and photos of the dead for confirmation. We have also established contact with our friends in Canada who have reached Manitoba, but we are told that the Canadian authorities are not allowing them inside (the hospital) for confirmation,” an elderly villager in Dingucha said, pleading anonymity.
The large group had walked for over 11 hours in the freezing cold hovering around -40 degrees Celcius to the US-Canada border. Jagdish Patel and his family got separated from the group during the night in the biting cold weather.
Their bodies were found about 12 metres inside Canada from the US-Canada border, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
According to the RCMP, its officers started search operations after they were told by the US Customs and Border Protection about the arrest of a group of people who had crossed into the US from Canada. The US agents told the RCMP that they had stopped a 15-passenger van about one kilometre from the international border and found two undocumented Indian nationals (Gujaratis) in it.
The van’s 47-year-old driver Steve Shand of Florida was arrested and charged with human smuggling.
At the same time, five more Indians – all Gujarati speaking – were arrested not far from where the van was stopped by the US border agents.
The five told investigators that they walked across the border from Canada to the US as they were to be picked up by someone. One of them revealed that he fraudulently got a student visa from India to come to Canada and then enter the US.
Among the five, a man and a woman suffered frostbites and were both taken to hospital. Because of her severe frostbite, the woman was airlifted to another hospital where she may have her hand amputated.
All the seven Indians (two found in the smuggler’s van and five arrested ) were found wearing same kind of clothes – black winter coats with fur-trimmed hoods, black gloves, black balaclavas and insulated rubber boots – provided by the human smuggler Steve Shand, say documents filed against Steve Shand in the U.S. District Court in Minnesota.
US authorities believe Shand is part of a wider human smuggling network as three incidents of human smuggling — on December 12, December 22, 2021 and January 12 — were reported from the same area where he was arrested.
