Shilpa Shetty was briefly detained by immigration officials at Mumbai airport Wednesday Sep 26th over a kiss she received from Richard Gere five months ago.
- Sep 28, 2007
AceShowbiz - Bollywood movie star Shilpa Shetty was detained and questioned at Mumbai airport Wednesday September 26th over a kiss she received from Richard Gere five months ago.
Shetty was on her way to Berlin where she is set to star in the musical "Miss Bollywood" when immigration officials stopped her. "She called me in the middle of the night and was in tears," her publicist Dale Bhagwagar said Thursday September 27th.
Immigration officials at Mumbai airport briefly detained Shetty, refusing to let her out the country, saying she was wanted for an obscenity charge over the kiss, which occurred during a public AIDS awareness event in New Delhi back in April.
"I can understand something like this if I'd committed a criminal offense. But what was my offense, when I'm just an actor, going to perform a musical on foreign land," Bhagwagar quoted Shetty as saying, adding that she was later on permitted to join her dance troupe after underwent a series of questions.
Gere and Shetty sparked an outcry among conservative hardline Hindus with the kissing incident. Accused to have violated the country's strict anti-obscenity laws, Gere as a consequence was granted an arrest warrant while Shetty was charged with obscenity, which resulted on her being banned from leaving the country.
In fact, the order was soon overturned by the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court ruling did not show up in the immigration department computer system, Bhagwagar said further, adding that Shetty's lawyers would take up the matter with authorities.
