Venezuela national held for entering airport with forged boarding pass

PUNE: A Venezuela national, Miguel Enrique Meneses (42), was arrested on Friday for allegedly preparing a fake boarding pass to enter the airport to see off his Uganda national friend around 8pm on Thursday.

The incident came to light when Meneses, a site reliability engineer at an IT company at e-commerce zone in Yerawada, tried to walk out through the departure gate.He will remain in police custody till September 24.
An official of the IndiGo security registered a complaint against him under sections 465 (punishment for forgery) and 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) of the Indian Penal Code at the Airport police station.
Senior inspector Dilip Shinde, the in-charge of the Airport police station, said, “Meneses is an international employee working with IT companies in different countries. He cannot communicate in English, Hindi and Marathi. On Thursday night, he visited the airport for seeing off his friend from Uganda. He showed an e-mail printout displaying the (fake) boarding pass (web-check-in) to a Central Industrial Security Force (CISF) staffer for gaining access to the airport.”
He said, “After his friend’s flight took off for New Delhi, Meneses tried to walk out through the departure gate. A CISF official intercepted him and checked the boarding pass. The official informed him that he would be allowed to walk out of the airport only if he was accompanied by an IndiGo official, provided he had cancelled his flight ticket.”
Shinde said, “The panicked foreigner then rushed to an IndiGo airline’s counter, showed the pass and sought assistance of their staffers for leaving the airport. On checking his boarding pass, an airline official found that he was possessing boarding pass of a Pune-Mumbai flight (6E-587), having departure time of 8pm. But there was no such flight available then. The official became suspicious and an inquiry revealed that he was issued a pass for boarding Pune-Hyderabad flight on August 24. He was then handed over to the CISF officials for taking action.”
He said, “Miguel told the CISF officials during questioning that he had forged the ticket of Pune to Hyderabad to Pune-Mumbai and had changed the date of flying for seeing off his friend, but he did not change the flight number. He was later handed over to the police.”