268 foreign nationals fly out of Kerala

Thiruvananthapuram: A special British Airways flight took off from here on Wednesday with 110 foreign nationals and picked up another 158 from Kochi to London.

A majority of the passengers were British nationals and also included nationals from Austria, Canada, Portugal, Ireland and Lithuania.

All of them were stranded here after the normal airline services were suspended following the nationwide lockdown which came into effect last month.

The passengers who boarded from Kochi included seven who had tested positive for Covid-19 and were treated successfully in Kochi.

Jeremy Pilmore-Bedford, Deputy High Commissioner in Bengaluru, was at the Kochi airport, supervising the repatriation operations.

This is the third aircraft to repatriate stranded passengers in Kerala from Europe since the lockdown. An Air India aircraft with 232 passengers left for Germany on March 31. Four days later, a second aircraft flew 112 people to France.