A US court found a resident of Ahmedabad guilty of human smuggling in July 2019. He returned to India after serving a year in prison just to carry on with his illicit enterprise, according to detectives looking into the state's human smuggling networks.
Bhavin Patel’s name has now cropped up in the Dingucha case in which four of a family froze to death while crossing illegally to the US from Canada last January, said the investigators.
The city crime branch booked Bhavin, along with his aides Jasmin Patel and Ronak Soni, for forging documents and using fake stamps on documents to procure visas. Sources in the city police said, “Bhavin, 43, was convicted in 2019 by a district court in New Jersey for ‘alien smuggling’.”
Bhavin Patel, a resident of Ghatlodia in Ahmedabad, was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison for his part in an international conspiracy to smuggle foreign nationals into the United States via commercial airline flights, according to an official statement from the Department of Justice, US Attorney's Office in the district of New Jersey.
Police sources said that Bhavin’s aide, Atul Patel, who runs a tour operating firm from a commercial building on Ashram Road, was also involved in the case.
Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) conducted an investigation and found that Bhavin had been flying passengers into the US on cargo planes from Bangkok, Thailand, since 2013. The New Jersey district court then handed down the verdict.
