Blue Bird Marine Services, a recruiting firm in India, offered 19-year-old Mumbai boy Randhir Singh Bhoi a job with the Dubai-based Al Jazia Fuel Trading Company (ajftc). Tempted by the offered salary " $150 per month " Randhir joined on January 23 as a deck cadet.
By May 10, he was dead. On May 11, Arabic papers carried a police advertisement seeking help in identifying a body dressed in shorts and a vest fished out from near Ajman port. Nobody came to claim the corpse. For 19 days, Randhir's body lay rotting in the mortuary. All this time, his employers neither informed the police nor his parents. Instead, they declared him absconding and deposited 5,000 dirhams in the Immigration Department as absconding fine. On May 13, Randhir's father, Kanwal Jeet Singh Bhoi, called up a colleague of Randhir on his mobile phone. The employee of Air-India was worried because when he had flown down to visit his son in the first week of May, Randhir had said he was working in miserable conditions. Also, he had been paid only 150 dirhams in four months. It was only after the agents promised they would transfer him to a better ship that the father returned to India.
The captain of the ship, Amir Asghar Akhtar, was reported as saying he had carried out a search on the night of May 10 after one of Randhir's friends informed him the boy was missing. But they could not find him. That job was left to the father, who traced his son to the morgue.
Singh Bhoi told a Dubai newspaper that neither the agents nor ajftc had cooperated with him when he set out on the search. They kept insisting Randhir was absconding even when his wallet, passport and other belongings lay in the ship. Bhoi is now said to be considering legal action against them.
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