It’s understandable that one of the world’s busiest airports has been even busier during the course of the last week. London was expecting an influx of around 600 000 tourists alone, and it’s now emerged that 10 members of a visiting male Himalayan choir have used the opportunity presented by the ensuing pandemonium to abscond, perhaps permanently. Cue an interesting episode of UK Border Force.

The 10 singers had been invited over from Nepal for the Cornwall International Male Voice Choral Festival but have not been seen since they passed through passport control at Heathrow on Tuesday.

David Peters, the festival organiser was needless to say, perplexed by it all, and offered the following:

We kept hoping they had missed the plane but it seems they have absconded.

It’s very sad. I naively hoped at first that perhaps they didn’t know what they were doing and were just confused in a foreign country.

But I fear they knew exactly what they were doing.

The Nepalese choir was to be one of the main attractions at the six-day festival that began on Wednesday.

An agitated Mr Peters continued:

I’m furious. We’ve had to re-organise everything. We have 30 shows and the Nepalese choir were supposed to appear in most of them.

It’s a great disappointment as they would have added an enormous amount of colour to the festival.

The Home Office is investigating what kind of visas the singers had and a spokesperson explained:

If they came in on a tourist visa they have done nothing wrong by not attending the festival.

But if it was a working visa sponsored by the chairman of the festival they would be breaking the law if they did not perform.

It’s fair to say that it does seem like they have indeed, absconded.

[Source: TheSun]