Bangladesh police detain 18 Rohingays who crossed over from India

Dhaka, May 12 (EFE) – Bangladesh Police Thursday detained 18 Rohingya refugees, mostly children, for allegedly illegally entering the country from neighboring India.

The suspected illegal migrants were detained from the eastern Moulvibazar district.

They are from four families, who lived in different places in India, Rabiul Haque, an inspector of Moulvibazar Sadar police station, told EFE.

Haque said the Rohingyas entered Bangladesh around 2 am through the Kulaura border in the district that borders India’s Tripura state.

“They were waiting at Moulvibazar bus stand in the morning to go Cox’s Bazar when we found them,” Haque said.

Haque said the Rohingyas were not known to each other and joined together during their journey before traffickers helped them cross the border.

“Three families said they were living in different places of Jammu and Kashmir. One woman could not name the state where she had been living. We assume she was somewhere in Assam as it took her 200 takas to reach there by bus,” he said.

“Rohingyas told us that they decided to leave India as local people were not allowing them there. We are yet to decide whether to take them to a court or send them to refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar,” he said.

An estimated 18,000 Rohingya refugees and asylum-seekers are registered with the UN refugee agency UNHCR in India, living across different locations.

A total of 926,561 Rohingyas are currently living in the refugee camps in Bangladesh, data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees showed.

Around 738,000 Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh after a campaign of persecution and violence launched by the Myanmar military in August 2017, termed ethnic cleansing and possible genocide by the UN.

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