The police in southern Assam’s Karimganj district caught 13 Myanmarese Rohingya, including six children, for illegally entering India from Bangladesh.
Senior police officials in the district said two of the 13 had been in India earlier. All of them are said to have fled a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar area of Bangladesh.
“They were detained from a Guwahati-bound night super bus that they had boarded in [Tripura capital] Agartala. They said their destinations were Delhi, Hyderabad and Jammu,” a police officer said.
The 13 were detained from Churaibari on the Assam-Tripura border on December 22. A local court later sent them to judicial custody.
This was the third case of detention of Rohingya refugees travelling from Tripura in a little more than a month.
In two separate incidents in November, 22 Rohingya were caught by the Assam police from a bus near the Tripura border. Some were caught by the Railway Protection Force and the Government Railway Police aboard a train near New Jalpaiguri railway station in West Bengal. They had boarded the train in Agartala.
There have been several instances in the past of Rohingya refugees entering the north-eastern States illegally from Bangladesh.
More than 7,38,000 Rohingya from Myanmar’s Rakhine took shelter in the camps in Cox’s Bazar following ethnic violence in August 2017.
