With the arrest of 10 more Myanmar Rohingyas, a total of 45 Myanmarese, including women and children, have been detained in the past two months for illegally entering northeast India, officials said on Thursday.
Northeast Frontier Railways’s (NFR) Chief Public Relations Officer Subhanan Chanda said that 10 Rohingyas, including five children and two women, were detained in the New Delhi-bound Rajdhani Special train on Wednesday. They were immediately de-boarded from the train at New Jalpaiguri station in West Bengal by the railway security personnel.
Chanda said that during interrogation they disclosed that they belong to the Rohingya community and boarded the train from Agartala station in Tripura.
“The foreign nationals crossed over to India’s Tripura on January 10 from Comilla in Bangladesh and boarded a train from Agartala with the help of an agent. They had come from Kutupalong refugee camp located in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh,” he said.
All the arrested persons were handed over to the Government Railway Police (GRP) in New Jalpaiguri. The Assam police, Railway Protection Force (RPF) and GRP troopers arrested 35 more Rohingyas, including children and a woman, in separate incidents during the past two months. They are now in jail.
The NFR operates fully and partially in six of the eight northeastern states, excluding Meghalaya and Sikkim, and in seven districts of West Bengal and five districts of north Bihar.
Rohingyas from refugee camps in southeast Bangladesh often enter the northeastern states of India illegally in search of jobs or get trapped in human trafficking. Border Guard Bangladesh (BGB) Director General Maj Gen Shafeenul Islam had said that the Rohingya refugees are a big problem and unless they return to Myanmar, the problem would remain for India and other countries.
After attending the five-day 51st Director General Level talks in Guwahati from December 22-26 with his Border Security Force (BSF) counterpart, Islam said that Rohingya Muslims are not only found in India, they are found across the world including countries like Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.
BSF DG Rakesh Asthana, who led the Indian team in the meeting, said that Rohingya Muslims are being occasionally caught in different parts of the country by the state security forces.
Over 738,000 Rohingyas from Rakhine in western Myanmar have taken shelter in camps in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh since the beginning of the ethnic troubles in August, 2017, in Myanmar following a wave of violence and persecution, which has been described by the United Nations as attempted ethnic cleansing.
