Special flight carrying 242 stranded Bangladeshi departs USA

ZOOMBANGLA DESK: A special chartered flight carrying 242 Bangladesh citizens stranded in the USA amid coronavirus pandemic departed for Dhaka from Washington on Friday night (US time), BSS reports.

Bangladesh Ambassador to the USA Mohammad Ziauddin saw off the passengers and wished their safe flight, a press release issued by Bangladesh Embassy in Washington DC said here this morning.

The chartered A 350-900 airbus of Qatar Airways took off at 11-04 pm on Friday night (US local time) from Dulles International Airport which is scheduled to land at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka at 4am (Bangladesh time) on Sunday after taking an hour technical stopover in Doha.

The travelling passengers include mostly Bangladeshi students studying in different colleges and universities in the USA, Bangladesh citizens who came to America on tourist and business visa and some government and non-government officials, said the release.

The passengers also include 49 school and college students who came to the USA under Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) program, it added.

All traveling passengers got Covid-19 symptom-free medical certificates while the embassy helped those passengers who could not arrange the medical certificates in cooperation with a pool of Bangladeshi doctors in the USA.

On May 4, the Ministry of the Foreign Affairs chartered the flight in coordination with the Bangladesh Embassy in Washington D.C. and the two Consulates General in New York and Los Angeles to bring back Bangladeshis who opted to go back home amid the flight suspension.

On Thursday, Bangladesh extended the ongoing ban on flight operation for the sixth consecutive time till May 30 to and from all European countries and the nations that restricted the entry of Bangladeshis to their territories as well as on all domestic routes over the coronavirus fear.

The government so far repatriated stranded Bangladeshis from different other countries including India, the UK, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea.

Other countries, including the USA, India, Japan, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Bhutan, Myanmar and different European countries also operated several special chartered flights amid the flight suspension to repatriate their citizens from here.

More than 300,000 people have so far been killed and nearly 4.5 million infected worldwide by the COVID-19, which has left half of humanity under some form of lockdown and pushed the global economy towards its worst downturn.