12 Rohingyas stay put at Indo-Bangladesh border in Tripura

AGARTALA: At least 12 Rohingya Muslim refugees, including five children and two women, who tried to enter India from Bangladesh, have been refusing to leave the Zero Line, along the India-Bangladesh border in Tripura, for the past three days, Border Security Force (BSF) official said on Saturday.

"The 12 refugees tried to enter India from Bangladesh through the Boxanagar border in western Tripura on Thursday. But, our troopers stopped them from infiltrating into India," a BSF official said.

"Later that day, a commandant level meeting was held between the Border Security Force (BSF) and the Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB) in which the latter agreed to take back the refugees, but the group has refused to leave the Zero Line," the official said.

The BSF official said that the refugees are carrying identity cards issued by the Bangladeshi authorities. "They are the inmates of Rohingya refugee camp in Chittagong," he said.

Earlier this week too, Tripura police arrested two Rohingya men from Rajnagar area near the India-Bangladesh international border.

According to the BSF and the police, over 250 Rohingya Muslims have been detained during the past one year in Tripura, southern Assam and Mizoram after they fled the Rohingya refugee camps in Chittagong in southeast Bangladesh.

Following a wave of violence in Myanmar's Rakhine province in 2017, over 7,38,000 Rohingya Muslims took refuge in Cox's Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh. Refugees from these camps have, on and off, entered the northeastern states of India.

Four northeastern states -- Arunachal Pradesh (520 km), Manipur (398 km), Nagaland (215 km) and Mizoram (510 km) -- share a 1,643-km long unfenced border with Myanmar.