The Maharashtra Police on Tuesday booked two trustees of a mosque in the Nevasa area of Ahmednagar district for hiding 10 foreign nationals who had attended the Tablighi Jamaat event in Delhi’s Nizamuddin and not informing the authorities about it. The 10 foreign nationals who were mostly from countries in the African continent had been inside the mosque premises.
“We had received information that some foreign nationals were present inside the mosque and so, we carried out a search and found 10 persons in the mosque premises. They were part of the same group that had attended the Tablighi Jamaat event at Nizamuddin in Delhi and then went to Tamil Nadu and then came to Ahmednagar for some religious purpose,” Ahmednagar SP Sagar Patil said.
He added, “Despite an advisory and repeated appeals by the government regarding the disclosure of persons with foreign travel and details of persons visiting Maharashtra from the foreign countries, the mosque trustees did not provide the information and tried to hide the persons amidst the ongoing pandemic of Covid-19.”
The Ahmednagar Police had on Sunday detained around 19 foreign nationals from two mosques in Jamkhed and Mukandnagar area and admitted them to the quarantine wards of the district hospital.
Of these, two were from Ivory Coast and France. They tested positive for coronavirus and this led to further checks being carried out by police regarding other persons who had attended the event in Delhi.
Around 10 persons in Telangana and Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) who had attended the event at Nizamuddin have died of Covid-19. More than 300 have been quarantined while several hundred are being traced by the authorities so that they could be quarantined to contain the spread of the infection.A total of three cases have been registered by Ahmednagar Police against the trustees of the three mosques where the 29 foreign nationals were provided shelter and kept hidden from the authorities. The trustees have been booked under several sections of the IPC and Disaster Management Act.
Meanwhile, the authorities across the country are now trying to trace persons who had attended the event of Tablighi Jamaat in Delhi earlier this month so that the community spread of Covid-19 could be contained and stopped further.
According to sources, over 1,500 persons attended the event and then travelled to various states in the country.
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