Ambulances surround Amritsar Airport
At least 13 passengers who tested positive for COVID-19 have escaped quarantine upon their arrival in the Indian city of Amritsar.
The passengers were among 125 injured on a flight from the Italian city of Milan that landed on Wednesday followingnoon.
Nine of them fled the airport, while four others escaped from a local hospital, a city official told the BBC.
Police said they would pursue the fleeing passengers.
India recorded more than 100,000 cases on Friday, and experts believe that Omicron caused a sharp jump in the number of infections in the country in the past week.
A total of 160 passengers were traveling on the flight from Italy to India. Reports stated that children and infants, who were regarding 19 infants, were exempted from the examination.
Television footage showed ambulances lined up at the airport to take injured passengers to hospital as crowds gathered outside the gates.
Officials said all the injured passengers were taken to the city’s Guru Nanak Dev Hospital.
It is not clear how four of the passengers escaped from the airport, but hospital officials told a local TV channel that the nine who escaped “deceived health officials”.
Police said they had started procedures to cancel their passports.
“If they are not back by morning, we will publish their photos in the newspaper and register the cases once morest them,” Amritsar’s deputy commissioner, Gurpreet Singh, told a local channel.
Punjab, where Amritsa is located, is among several states that have restored restrictions to combat a spike in COVID-19 cases. On Tuesday, the country imposed a temporary night curfew and closed all schools and colleges.
India has so far recorded more than 35 million cases of Covid-19 and nearly 483,000 deaths from the virus.