MUMBAI: A Pune-based businessman who went incommunicado at Mumbai airport, prompting his wife to file a kidnapping complaint, had allegedly fabricated a story about immigration problems to conceal a trip to Kuala Lumpur with a woman friend, police said on Friday.The 46-year-old, who owns a laundry business, had planned to fly to the Malaysian capital on September 14 with the woman. However, their plans were disrupted after immigration officials detected that she was travelling on an old passport that she had previously declared lost, a police official said.With legal action looming over the passport issue, the man allegedly feared that his wife, who had been told that the trip was for business, would find out that he was travelling with another woman, the official said.“After his woman friend was stopped by the immigration department, the businessman cancelled his journey, switched off his mobile phone, and went to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT), Central Railway’s main station in south Mumbai, with her,” the Sahar police station official said.Before leaving the airport, he called his wife from a landline and told her that he had to surrender his mobile phone due to an immigration issue, the official said.“After a brief WhatsApp video call the next day to his wife where he reiterated his claim, the businessman’s phone went unreachable. His wife approached police on Wednesday and a kidnapping FIR was registered based on her complaint,” the official said.The man returned to Sahar police station, which has jurisdiction over Mumbai’s international airport, on Wednesday night after learning about the FIR. He then confessed that he had fabricated the story about the immigration issue, police said.“We will file a ‘C Summary’ closure report in court. It is a classification used when a case is registered under a genuine mistake of fact or found to be neither entirely true nor false within two weeks,” the official explained.(With Agency Inputs)
