Biotruck: News update

A message from Andy Pag, now held up in India.

So many people have been mailing to ask what's going on, so to update you all:

I am free to move around India on Bail until the 23rd of this month when I have to appear in court.

My hope is that the police will have finished my case file by then, but they are entitled to take 90 days over it and are waiting for Thuraya to provide call details from my phone to corroborate that I didn't use it in India.

Their monitoring equipment detected my phone being used at strange times of the day, which I am sure it was not. I can't explain this discrepancy other than by an error in the detection equipment.

Investigating officers have told me that this discrepancy is the only cause for suspicion left. Getting the call records could take 5 days, 10 days, 30 days, 90 days, it might never happen. I don't think Thuraya are obliged to pass the details on.

I'm still facing an anti-terrorism charge which carries a 10 year prison sentence.

There is a hope that if the police get the phone call records they will drop the anti-terror charge. No guarantees of this but my lawyer seems confident this will be the case.

The other two charges are punitive, that means they carry a fine but no prison time. (€2 for one, and €20 for the other), and can be decided instantly by a judge.

My hope is that this is all resolved as quickly as possible, and that the police drop the anti-terror charge (the information technology act section 70) and submit the case file by the 22nd, so this can all be over by the 23rd.

Obviously the police have to be sure that I am not a security risk, and while I think I have proved it already beyond reasonable doubt, the call records would prove it once and for all beyond ALL doubt. I know they are doing all they can to get the matter sorted.

Come on Thuraya, get your finger out.

FURTHER UPDATE:
Thuraya have now emailed a confirmation that the phone hasn't been used in India, which has been passed on to the Prosecutor's office, which hopefully will mean the end of the matter.
Finger's crossed.

If you are travelling to India, make sure you have permission to use a Sat phone if you have one. You have been warned!

Going Down and Bowing Out

So after all it turns out I’m not a terrorist, so I’m not going to prison again.

But it’s not a happy ending, because its resulted in the end of my journey. This court case has cost me €6000. To put it in perspective; from the UK to India I spent about €3000 on 3 months travel. India was meant to be one of the cheaper legs of the journey. My contingency cash is wiped out, and quite a lot more besides.

While I could afford to carry on for a bit, but I could only get to a place where I couldn’t afford to come back from, so I’m going to head to Nepal and then finish the trip and then head home via the lowest carbon route possible, unless I can find some cash sponsors here in India that can save the expedition.

It took 18 months to get the sponsorship together to set off for this trip, and most of that was support in kind. The vast majority of the cash was my own savings, so I know how hard it is to raise cash from organisations, and I’m under no illusion how difficult it will be.

However I am able to muster a lot of press interest here, and during the last few months I’ve met some pretty influential people who have been very supportive so perhaps they will be able to call on their networks to rally the support needed.

The final insult is that it looks like I won’t be able to get my €600 bail bond back either because I’m a foreigner which means I fall into yet another Indian bureaucratic catch-22. That, and I still have to undergo the timely, costly and dehumanising make-it-up-as-you-go-along procedure of getting my visa changed so I can actually leave India.

No one has admitted responsibility for the decisions which resulted in the case becoming such an unnecessarily costly affair and no one has apologised, and this has added to my bitterness and anger over the whole affair. I’m trying to let go but it’s really hard, and it’s certainly no fun for me being this angry.

Getting my phone back only served to vindicate that this has all been an unjustifiable waste of time and money at the hands of idiots. Under Indian law, I’d have had an easier time of it if I’d been dealing drugs to school kids.

I’ll be gutted if I have to can the trip here over this bad luck. It was going so well. Almost 20,000km without using fossil fuels, and more fuel-from-waste supplies lined up across India ready for the next leg into South East Asia. It would be terrible if it had to end over something as stupid as this sat phone case.

Posted by Andy Pag

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