13 Myanmar Rohingyas held in Assam

SILCHAR: With the arrest of 13 more Myanmar Rohingya Muslims in Assam, a total of 35 Myanmarese, including women and children, have been detained in the past one month for illegally entering Northeast India, said officials on Thursday.

An Assam Police official in Karimganj said that acting on information, 13 Rohingyas, suspected to be refugees fleeing from their camps in southeast Bangladesh, were held on Wednesday from Churaibari in southern Assam.

According to the police, the foreign nationals including six children and three women, were detained from a Guwahati-bound night bus from Agartala.

The adult men and women detainees are aged between 20 and 33 years.

"The Rohingyas might have entered Tripura from Bangladesh before moving for Guwahati by bus in search of jobs," the police official said.

"During the initial questioning, the Rohingyas admitted that they were trying to go to Hyderabad or Jammu in search of work," the official said.

In the latter part of November, the Assam police, Railway Protection Force (RPF) and Government Railway Police (GRP) troopers arrested 22 Rohingyas, including children and a woman, in two separate incidents. They are now in jail.

Rohingyas from refugee camps in Bangladesh often enter the northeastern states of India illegally in search of jobs or get trapped in human trafficking. 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.

Four north-eastern States -- Arunachal Pradesh (520 km), Manipur (398 km), Nagaland (215 km) and Mizoram (510 km) -- share 1,643 km long unfenced borders with Myanmar while Tripura (856 km), Meghalaya (443 km), Mizoram (318 km) and Assam (263 km) share 1,880 km long borders with Bangladesh. (IANS)

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