Detained Indian students to contest deportation

The parents of five Indian students, detained by the police since Friday, yesterday told The Times they were very worried about the fate of their children.

The students, aged between 19 and 22, are in Malta on student visas to study at a logistics and management school in Ħamrun.

Yesterday, they were only allowed to communicate with their parents for five minutes.

Speaking through an interpreter, the parents said that before this, the last time they had heard from their children was on Friday afternoon when their mobile phones were confiscated by the police.

"It was only yesterday we spoke to them again for five minutes," the concerned parents said.

The students, Boskey Patel, Firoz Diwan, Suhasini Parmar, Robert Chettiar and Amarjeet Bajwa, are supposed to be in Malta for a full academic year.

A spokesman for the police confirmed that five Indian nationals, two women and three men, had been detained on Friday and a removal order to deport them back to India was issued against them.

"They were issued with student visas but from school records it transpired they skipped school. Furthermore, they had no money to sustain themselves," the spokesman said.

Regular school attendance is a condition that goes with student visas.

However, the parents have contested the police action: "Our children are not terrorists. They are in Malta legally."

The students yesterday met with the representative of the Indian Consulate Johann Cuschieri and are expected to appeal the removal order in the coming days.

The reason why the students did not go to school remains unclear and Mr Cuschieri insisted he did not want to pre-judge the court appeal where more details would emerge.

The students were reported to the police by the school authorities. The director of SSM School, Alexander Borg, defended his school's actions.

"When a visa is issued to students I am responsible for them. We verbally warned them more than once and then got them to sign an agreement that they will attend school regularly.

"When they continued to be absent we were left with no option but to report them to the police," he said, insisting the obligation to inform the police was a condition imposed by visa regulations.

Mr Borg said he would not be taking the students back.