The Chennai police have found themselves in the midst of a baffling mystery after finding 50 passports dumped in a postbox on 28th Street in Nanganallur, reported Sindhu Kanan of The Times of India. While 13 passports were found on Wednesday, another 37 had earlier been found on June 2 and 6, 2016,
As the area in which the passports were recovered is not covered by CCTV cameras, the police have thus far been unable to track down the persons responsible for dumping the passports. The passports were found to have been issued from various locations, including Thiruvananthapuram, Hyderabad, Trichy, Chennai, Visakhapatnam, Mumbai, Singapore, Madurai, UAE, Kuala Lumpur, Chennai, even from Illinois, USA.
The passports have been sent to the Foreigner Regional Registration Offices, and 23 documents have been found to be original documents. Ten had expired, while the owners of the rest had obtained duplicate passports.
According to an inquiry carried out by TOI, five passports were lost by people at the airport while returning from abroad. Police suspect that the lost passports were perhaps stored at the airport, and not returned to their owners or handed over to the airport police. But they still do not have an explanation for why passports lost five years ago were dumped along with passports lost six months ago.
Regional passport officer K Balamurugan told TOI that they were informed about the dumped passports by officials of India Post. Based on whether the passports are genuine, the passport authorities will coordinate further with police officers, he said.