2 more flights with Indians evacuated from Iran arrive in Delhi
Two-hundred and ninety Indians, including students and pilgrims, arrived on a charter flight on Friday night, the ministry said.
The second flight arrived at 3 am on Saturday from Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. More than 100 Indians who had travelled to Ashgabat from Iran earlier were on board the flight.
With this, 517 Indian citizens have returned under the evacuation exercise codenamed Operation Sindhu.
The first flight as part of Operation Sindhu with 110 Indian students had arrived in Delhi on Thursday.
The students had been evacuated to Armenia from Iran on Wednesday. They were studying at Urmia University in northwestern Iran and had been evacuated to neighbouring Armenia on Tuesday.
Iran had eased airspace restrictions to allow three chartered flights to evacuate about 1,000 Indians from the country, the Hindustan Times quoted Mohammad Javad Hosseini, the deputy chief of mission at the Iranian embassy in Delhi, as saying on Friday.
The Indian citizens were first relocated from the capital Tehran to the city of Qom, and then to Mashad city in northeastern Iran. They were being brought back to India from Mashad.
One more flight was expected to arrive in Delhi on Saturday.
The Indian external affairs ministry said that New Delhi was 'grateful to the Government of Iran for the facilitation of the evacuation process'.
The latest round of the conflict between Israel and Iran started on June 13 when the Israeli military struck what it claimed were nuclear targets, and also other sites, in Iran with the aim of stalling Tehran's nuclear programme. Iran retaliated with missile attacks on Israel.
The continued attacks have led to concerns of a wider conflict in the region.
On June 15, Iran had said that 224 persons had been killed in the conflict. In Israel, at least 24 persons have been killed in Iranian attacks so far.
Israel has claimed that Iran was 'closer than ever' to obtaining a nuclear weapon, and said it had no choice but to 'fulfil the obligation to act in defence of its citizens'. Iran has long maintained that its nuclear programme is for civilian purposes.
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