Remaining 6 Rohingya men freed after furnishing bail bonds

With the release of six male Rohingya Muslims from jail, all the 31 refugees who were stranded on the India-Bangladesh border for four days last month are now free, their counsel said Thursday. Eight women and 17 children of the group of 31 had already been released.

The six male Rohingyas were released on Wednesday night after the Rohingya Refugee Committee (RRC), an organisation working for Rohingyas in the country, furnished their bail bonds. West Tripura District and Sessions Judge S L Tripura had granted bail to the six men on Monday, their counsel Prasenjit Debnath said.

Mohhammad Shaqir, who had come from New Delhi as a field representative of the RRC, said they submitted Rs 1.80 lakh for the six male refugees. The RRC had paid the bail amount for the eight women and 17 children and they were released from the Bishalgarh Central Jail on Tuesday.

The court had granted bail to the women and children on January 22 and sent the remaining six Rohingya men to judicial custody for 14 days. However, the women and children had to remain in jail as no one appeared to pay their bail amount.

Judge Tripura Monday ordered for releasing them from jail after the bail bonds of Rs 5,000 for each of them were deposited by the RRC. The 31 Rohingyas, who had apparently come from Jammu and Kashmir, were stuck in a no man's land beyond the barbed wire fence along the India-Bangladesh border in Tripura since January 18.

The Border Security Force (BSF), after consulting with the Union Home Ministry, had handed them over to the Amtoli police station in West Tripura district on January 22. They were later produced before the court. Debnath, who had appeared in court on behalf of them, sought their bail on the grounds that they could not be treated as illegal immigrants because India was a signatory to the resolutions of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

He also pleaded before the court that there would be no one to look after the innocent children in the absence of their mothers. The court granted bail to the women and children, but as no one appeared to furnish the bail bonds, they were sent to the Bishalgarh Central Jail. The male Rohingyas were also lodged in the same jail.

The situation of the 31 Rohingyas had led to a blame game between the BSF and its counterpart in Bangladesh, the Border Guards Bangladesh (BGB), with the two sides accusing each other of pushing them into their territories. The decision to hand over the Rohingyas to the Tripura Police was taken after the BSF and the BGB failed to reach a decision during several rounds of talks on the issue.

Security forces had apprehended 12 and 62 Rohingyas in Tripura in 2017 and 2018 respectively. In October 2017, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had ordered all the state governments to identify and monitor Rohingya refugees.

It had said that the Centre viewed the infiltration of Rohingyas from the Rakhine state of Myanmar into Indian territory as a burden on the country's resources, aggravating the security challenges to the country. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims, described by the UN as the most persecuted minority in the world, fled their homes in 2017 to escape an alleged crackdown by the Myanmarese military. Many of them reached India via Bangladesh.

(With inputs from agencies.)