in With the detention of 13 more Myanmar Rohingya Muslims in Assam, a total of 35 Myanmarites, which include women and girls, have been apprehended for illegally entering North East India for the past month, officials said Thursday.
An Assam police officer in Karimganj said that 13 Rohingyas, believed to be refugees fleeing their camps in south-east Bangladesh, were held on Wednesday from Churaibari in southern Assam.
According to the police, foreign nationals, including six children and three women, were detained on a Guwahati night bus from Agartala.
Adult men and woman inmates are aged 20 and 33 years of age. The Rohingyas may have reached Tripura from Bangladesh before heading to Guwahati by bus to find employment,” the police officer 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, 22 Rohingyas, including children and a woman, were arrested by the Assam Police, the Railway Protection Force (RPF) and the Government Railway Police (GRP) in two separate incidents. 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 northeastern 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.
