The Tamil Nadu Police department has booked ten Malaysian nationals on Sunday after they reportedly attempted to flee the country through the special aircraft from Chennai International Airport amid the lockdown and curfew that have been imposed in the state to contain the spread of the Coronavirus.

According to the reports, the special aircraft of Batik Airlines, which is the Indonesian based airliner, was scheduled to airlift around 167 Malaysian nationals who were stranded, due to the closures of the transportation channels amid the COVID-19 outbreak, from Chennai International Airport to their home country on Sunday. However, the state police department has detained 10 Malaysians who were among the people in the aircraft. The police had said that these ten people attended the Jamaat Conference that was organized in Delhi and they reportedly failed to disclose to the authorities that they had participated in the event.

They have been arrested for concealing the fact. The reports say that the group had arrived in India through availing tourist visa and they took part in the Jamaat Conference in March after which they arrived in Madurai on March 12 through the train and traveled to southern districts of Tamil Nadu. The state government has been gripping up the measures to trace the people who had attended the conference, which has emerged as the national hotspot for the virus and these people have attempted to flee the country. 

The reports stated that the state law enforcement agency had booked them under the grounds of the Epidemic Diseases Act, Foreigners Act, and the National Disaster Management Act of the Indian Penal Code. The Conference was organized by Tablighi Jamaat in Nizamuddin, Delhi and it took place between March 8th and 21st during which over two thousand people including Indians and the people from virus affected countries had participated and after the conference, the people have scattered across many Indian states and cities that had led the country to witness more numbers of the nationwide affected cases and the conference has become hotspot as most of the cases in the country had linked to the conference.

The Tamil Nadu government said that nearly 1,500 people from the state had participated in the event and over 1,100 had returned to the state and the health department has been tracing and locating those who had attended the conference and appealed them to report to the hospitals for testings and advised them to maintain self-isolation to contain the spread of the pandemic. As of Monday morning, the state had reported with 571 cases of which 522 had attended the conference. The death toll in the state stands at five of which three deceased were part of the Jamaat conference.