An Interpol Red Notice has been issued against Sudarshan Gautam on the charge of human trafficking. Gautam had played as a lead actor on Rekha Thapa’s movie Himmatwali – released in 2014 and He is the first person without arms to climb Mount Everest without the use of prosthetics, on May 20, 2013.
Gautam, a Nepali-born Canadian national, Born in Ramechhap district of Nepal, Gautam became a Canadian citizen in 2007.
According to the Inspector General of Police Secretariat, the Red Notice was issued against Gautam on Thursday. He has been accused of leading a racket to traffic Nepalis to the US and Canada.
A year ago, three Nepali women were being trafficked to the United States of America through a ferried ship from Haiti. The ship included around 100 individuals, of different nationalities, who were trying to enter the United States illegally.
According to police, the traffickers had presented the three women as members of a film crew in order to smuggle them to Haiti.
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Upon reaching Haiti, the three women were assured that they would be taken to the United States on the ship. However, the ship broke down in the middle of the route and all those onboard got stuck in the middle of the sea.
The ship was stuck in the middle of the sea for more than a fortnight with the passengers having no food to eat for days. During that period, one of the three Nepali women died. Her body was thrown into the sea, as others feared infection.
According to high-level officers at Nepal Police, the ship reached the shore of the Bahamas, a country in North America, after some days of the woman’s death. When the coast guards of the Bahamas saw the ship, they took it under their control. Since the passengers had fallen sick, they took all of them to a hospital for treatment.
The remaining two Nepali women contacted their family members in Nepal through the United States Embassy in the Bahamas. The duo was then repatriated to Nepal with the help of the Embassy.
Once the women came to Nepal, they filed a complaint against the traffickers at the Metropolitan Crime Division after which the investigation started. Senior Superintendent of Police Dhiraj Pratap Singh, chief of the division, told “After the complaint was registered, we arrested four individuals involved in the trafficking. When the four were being interrogated, we came to know that the kingpin of the trafficking racket was Gautam.”
VIEW PHOTO GALLERY: Sudarshan Gautam and Rekha Thapa
The division then filed a case at the Kathmandu District Court, which sent the four arrested to judicial custody. A warrant was then issued against Gautam. Since Gautam was in Canada, Nepal Police started the process to issue the Red Notice against Gautam through Interpol nearly nine months back.
“Gautam will be arrested soon. Once he is arrested, we will start the process to repatriate him to Nepal in order to present him in court,” said an official at the Inspector General of Police Secretariat.
According to police, Gautam’s racket was involved in trafficking Nepalis mostly to the US and Canada for a long time. Gautam is still in Canada. According to the Secretariat, recently there are 32 Red Notices and 36 diffusion notices issued against Nepalis by the Interpol.
