Two youths, both residents of Haryana, were arrested at Calcutta airport on Thursday evening on charges of tampering with their passports.

Balwinder Singh, 31, and Gurnam Singh, 24, arrived at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International airport from Bangkok on an Air India Express flight at 3pm. The tampering was detected by immigration officials in the arrival lounge.

The duo run a flour mill in Kurukshetra and wanted to work in Australia. In 2007, they came in touch with a tout, Jarnail Singh, who introduced them to another tout in Malaysia, identified as Bakshi Chand.

Chand promised to get Australian work visas issued to them in Malaysia, the Singhs told the officers.

The two went to Malaysia on January 23 and got the visas against a payment of Rs 7 lakh. “But on verification they found the documents to be forged,” said an immigration officer.

They tried to contact Chand but he had disappeared by then. “They knew that they would be caught if they tried entering Australia with the forged visas. So, they stayed back and searched for Chand,” the officer added.

But they could not manage to trace Chand and after having run out of money, they decided to return to India. Before boarding the flight for Calcutta, they unsuccessfully tried to rub off the visa stamps from their passports.

To avoid detection, the two then pasted the pages bearing the forged visa stamps with the facing pages.

The immigration authorities in Calcutta detected the forgery and detained them. They were later handed over to airport police station.