Silchar (Assam), (Samajweekly) A total of 15 Myanmar Rohingyas, including three women and six children, were arrested in southern Assam on Saturday when they were going to Tripura from Uttar Pradesh by train, officials said.
Officials said that the Rohingyas were trying to go back to Bangladesh via Tripura, which shares an 856 km border with Bangladesh.
The Railway Protection Force (RPF) personnel detained the 15 Rohingyas at the Badarpur railway station in southern Assam’s Karimganj district while they were coming from Aligarh in Uttar Pradesh and trying to catch a Tripura-bound train.
The RPF personnel handed them over to the Government Railway Police (GRP).
A GRP official said that after preliminary interrogation, the Rohingyas confessed that they had gone to Uttar Pradesh a few months back and stayed in different cities in search of jobs.
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) officials have said that the Rohingya refugees are a big problem and unless they return to Myanmar, the problem would remain for India, Bangladesh and other countries.
“The Rohingya Muslims are not only found in India, they are found across the world, including countries like Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia,” a BGB official had said.
The Border Security Force officials have said that Rohingya Muslims are being occasionally caught in different parts of the country, especially in the northeastern states, by the state security forces, creating serious security problems.
Over 738,000 Rohingyas from Rakhine in western Myanmar have taken shelter in camps in Cox’s Bazar in southeast Bangladesh since the beginning of the ethnic troubles in Myanmar in 2017, which has been described by the United Nations as attempted ethnic cleansing.
