MUMBAI: Fourteen passengers who had boarding passes for on Indigo Goa-Hyderabad flight were left behind at Goa airport on Monday. They alleged that the flight departed early sans announcement. But Indigo spokesperson said that they made several announcements calling the passengers to report at the gate and the passengers reported after the gate was closed.Flight 6E 259 was scheduled for a 10.50pm departure, but according to passengers departed 25 minutes before the scheduled time of departure. The 14 passengers, who had their boarding passes and were waiting to board the flight were left behind unawares at the airport. The flight's scheduled time of arrival was 12.05am, but it had already landed at the destination at 11.40pm.An Indigo spokesperson said that the passengers were declared "gate no-show". Boarding gate closed at 10:25pm, they reached the gate at 10.33pm. Three of IndiGo staff searched them at airport while making frantic announcements over hand-held loud speaker," said the airline. "They even made phone call given on their phone number, which turned out to be that of their travel agent Thomas Cook who refused to give us their phone numbers but promised us that they will inform the passengers," the spokesperson said adding that many other passengers were witnessed to the airline's efforts to search them at airport." In the best interest of those passengers boarded on-time, we closed the gates and deplaned these passengers who couldn't reach on time. Despite there is no fault on our part IndiGo shifted them to next flight tomorrow morning free of cost," the airline added.The incident raises the question of whether IndiGo carried out "passenger baggage reconciliation", a mandatory security norm which requires an airline to check whether all the passengers who have checked in their bags are on board the aircraft as well.An Indigo spokesperson said that the airline had offloaded the check-in bags of the said passengers.Read this story in Bengali