MUMBAI: Over charges of downloading child pornography , an Indian pilot was handcuffed in front of passengers and deplaned by US law enforcement authorities soon after his flight from New Delhi landed in San Francisco airport on Monday.

The Mumbai-based pilot, who is in his fifties, is employed as a first officer with an Indian carrier and frequently operates flights to the United States. Under current regulations, air carriers operating America-bound flights must transmit to the US Bureau of Customs and Border Protection the passenger manifest and crew details no later than 15 minutes after the departure of the flight.

“FBI agents must have waited for him to re-enter the US. He was arrested, his passport seized, his US visa cancelled. He was then put back on a flight to Delhi and deported from the US,” a source said, adding that the said pilot would not be able to visit the US again.

“It was later learnt that he had been under scanner of the FBI ( Federal Bureau of Investigation ) for the past two months for accessing and downloading child pornography. His internet usage in hotels during layovers in the US was monitored to gather evidence. The FBI has apparently sent a sealed dossier with the evidence to Indian authorities,” said another source.

A spokesperson for the airline said that the pilot was deported over visa issues. But at least three independent sources from the airline confirmed that the visa issue in question was related to child pornography charges.

American federal law defines child pornography as any visual depiction of sexually explicit conduct involving a minor. The United States Code prohibits “any persons outside of the United States to knowingly produce, receive, transport, ship, or distribute child pornography with intent to import or transmit the visual depiction into the United States”.

In 2014, in an unprecedented investigation, the FBI had investigated a site called “Playpen” which hosted child pornography. According to media reports, the agency obtained a search warrant and seized the server hosting the site. Instead of shutting the site down, the FBI continued to operate the child porn website for nearly two weeks. During this time, it applied for and received a single warrant to send malware to thousands of unsuspecting visitors of the site.

The FBI’s malware searched for and copied certain identifying information from users’ computers. With this information, the FBI searched thousands of computers, located all over the world. The American government then prosecuted hundreds of people across the country as a result of this investigation. The US government later acknowledged that more than a thousand computers all over the world were infected by its malware.



In Video: Indian pilot arrested in San Francisco on charges of downloading child pornography