Chennai: A total of 348 Indian citizens from across the country tamil nadu Since the outbreak of war in West Asia, India and its neighbors have been stranded in Iran for more than a month and arrived in Chennai on a special flight arranged by Indian embassy officials from Armenia.Of the 348 passengers, 327 were Tamils, 5 were from Puducherry and 10 were from Kerala. Most Tamils are natives of Tirunelveli, Kanyakumari and Nagapattinam districts and work as fishermen in Iran. They were received by Union Minister Piyush Goyal and TN Janata Party chief Nainar Nagenthran and taken to their respective towns in special buses.The returnees said they were unsure of their fate until the moment they arrived in Tamil Nadu.Peter Blacian, a 46-year-old resident of Kanyakumari, said they had barely been able to sleep over the last month as a series of explosions occurred nearby every day. “It’s hard to explain how we feel. We have almost no hope,” he said. Peter Blacian and 22 others are employees of Kish Island in Bandar Bandar, and their main job is to venture out to sea for fishing.Although their employer provided them with food when war broke out in Iran, they had to pay out of their own pockets to leave their workplace and take a dangerous 18-hour bus ride to the city of Qom, where they were received by Indian embassy officials.“From there, the embassy took good care of us, providing us with proper food and accommodation, and we traveled further to Armenia via Julfal,” he said. Aneesh Raja, 34, another Konyakumari native, said he had gone to Iran just three months ago and did not expect to return in such a crisis. “We came all the way to Iran to work as fishermen to earn better income, but now the prospects are bleak,” he said.
