New Delhi: US national Matthew VanDyke boarded a flight home Friday, a day after a Delhi court allowed him and six Ukrainian nationals—arrested by the NIA earlier this year on charges of crossing over to Myanmar to train ethnic armed groups—to return to their respective countries for a month, ThePrint has learnt.
Having booked his return ticket on the “first flight” available, VanDyke boarded an Etihad flight to Washington via West Asia and is scheduled to reach Saturday morning, sources privy to his itinerary told ThePrint.
This comes less than 24 hours after VanDyke, along with his six co-accused from Ukraine, walked out of Delhi’s Tihar jail after they were granted default bail under immigration offences and discharged by a special NIA court.
Special Judge Prashant Sharma had ordered his court to send a copy of his order allowing their pleas to go back home to the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO), which had slapped a penalty of Rs 5.5 lakh on each of them and compounded offences under the Immigration Act.
“Based on the court’s order, an exit permit was granted by the FRRO on Friday,” a source said.
All six Ukrainian nationals—Hurba Petro, Slyviak Taras, Ivan Sukmanovskyi, Stefankiv Marian, Honcharuk Maksim, and Kaminskyi Viktor- however, are still in India, ThePrint has learnt.
A Delhi court had allowed their application to return home for a period of one month on condition that they would cooperate with the probe, as the NIA has argued before the court that further investigation with regard to their activities in Myanmar, which may come under the purview of an Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act probe, is still ongoing.
Their counsels—Rohit Dandriyal and Rohit Gour for VanDyke, and Nitin Saluja for all six Ukrainian nationals—had approached the court for permission to return home to meet their families after they were granted bail.
All seven were initially arrested by the NIA under the UA(P)A. However, the agency did not invoke UAPA provisions against them in their chargesheet citing a lack of evidence to suggest that their acts affected India’s national interest or Indian nationals. At the same time, they maintained that an investigation under the anti-terror law was still underway.
(Edited by Gitanjali Das)