Family visit visa issued, but issue with passport.

[O_Relly]

Hello,

My mum recently renewed her passport in India and later applied for family visit visa to visit me here in the UK which has been granted. However, there is an issue with her passport now, as the online tracking status for her passport now says "SCN Possible Impounding notification has been dispatched on 18/07/2012"

A little bit of background,

My parents live in 2 cities (Bangalore and Chennai) in India and keep travelling between the two.

My mum applied for renewal of passport from Chennai in February, and the passport was issued in a weeks time (after which I stopped checking the online tracking status) after which they had to travel to a different city for more than a month for family emergency and then to Bangalore.

After an absence of 4 months, when they returned to chennai, they received a letter from the passport office saying something like 'adverse police report received, you have suppressed information while applying for your renewal, possible impounding of passport, so please make a fresh application or visit our office and clarify' (Apparently there was a police verification that was sent immediately after issuing the passport and nobody was available at home)

My parents immediately went to the passport office and provided ration card proof, to establish residence in chennai and explained reason for absence. The authorities seemed convinced and updated their records and mentioned that it was cleared. They were told that there might be another police verification.

Assuming everything was cleared, they went ahead and applied for the family visit visa to the UK.

When I checked the online tracking status for the passport, it had the old date in February which said, sent for police verification, so I assumed that it was the old status and hadn't been updated yet.

Then recently again, I just casually checked the passport tracking status, and it says, "SCN Possible Impounding notification has been dispatched on 18/07/2012"

They haven't received any letter yet, but when they visited the passport office, they are asking us to come back once we get the letter. It is already the 26th and with a travel date of 6th August, this is causing a lot of stress.

Has anybody faced a similar issue ? Are we able to travel with the current passport and visa in it ?

They are flying out from Bangalore, but are stuck in Chennai at the moment waiting for letter from passport office to get this cleared.

Sorry if this was posted in the wrong forum, but any help / advice is much appreciated.

Kind regards,
OR