Three women from Punjab who had paid Rs 20 lakh to a tout to settle down in the UK were caught with forged documents in Cambodia and sent back to Calcutta where they were arrested on Sunday.

Taranjit Kaur, 31, Baljit Kaur, 28, and Harjit Kaur, 29, told immigration officials that they had worked as sales girls in Punjab and dreamt of shifting to the UK.

They identified the tout as Manjit, a resident of Delhi. A search is on for him.

“The women claimed that they did not know each other and they contacted the tout independently,” said an immigration official in Calcutta.

“We are verifying their statements,” said Basab Talukdar, the deputy commissioner of security control and foreigners’ regional registration officer in Calcutta.

Over the past few months, a number of people — mostly from Punjab, Haryana and Gujarat — were arrested at Calcutta airport for trying to leave the country with forged documents.

Officials said two of the Kaurs had paid Rs 7 lakh each to Manjit and the third around Rs 5 lakh. The tout had told them that they would be taken to the UK through Phnom Penh as checks in the Cambodian capital were not stringent.

Manjit had accompanied the trio from Delhi to Bangkok, and from there to Phnom Penh. On November 13, when the women arrived at Phnom Penh International Airport to leave for the UK, Manjit took away their passports and gave them three forged UK passports.

When the trio produced the passports at the immigration counter, the officials detected the fraud and detained the women. Manjit was nowhere to be found.

“The women did not have any money and so they were allowed to contact their families, who sent them money,” said an official. Later, they were handed over to the Indian embassy where officials issued emergency certificates to them.

The certificates are issued to foreigners who misplace their passports. But the ones issued to the trio mentioned that they were trying to travel on forged documents.

After staying more than a month at Phnom Penh, the Kaurs arrived at Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose International Airport through Bangkok on a Thai Airways flight early on Sunday.

They were immediately held by the immigration authorities and later handed over to the airport police station.