E-Paper
NIA: Racketeers helping Rohingya enter country
“Investigation has revealed that the accused persons were involved in organised trafficking of Rohingyas/Bangladeshi minor girls, women in association with other conspirators based in different parts of India and Bangladesh,” the NIA said in a statement on June 6
Six persons from India’s northeast have been accused of human trafficking involving Rohingyas of Myanmar and Bangladeshi nationals, who were brought into India using forged and fake documents, which the National Investigation Agency says is part of a larger conspiracy to destabilise the population ratio in the country.
The federal investigators on June 4 pressed charges in a special court in Guwahati against Kumkum Ahmed Choudhury, Ahiya Ahmed Choudhury, Bapan Ahmed Choudhury, Shahalam Laskar and Jamaluddin Choudhury from Assam’s Cachar district, and Wanbiang Suting from East Jaintia Hills district of Meghalaya for criminal conspiracy, trafficking of multiple persons and trafficking of minors under sections 120(b) and 370(3) and 370(5) of Indian Penal Code.
“Investigation has revealed that the accused persons were involved in organised trafficking of Rohingyas/Bangladeshi minor girls, women in association with other conspirators based in different parts of India and Bangladesh,” the agency said in a statement on June 6. “The accused persons had arranged for transportation, accommodation, procurement of fake documents, etc., for the trafficked Rohingya victims.”
While details of the charge sheet are not yet available, the six accused were just a few members of a wider organised network involved in sending Rohingyas and Bangladeshis into India, NIA officials said, seeking anonymity.
The NIA said that besides the pecuniary benefit associated with the trafficking of humans from one country to another, there’s a more sinister design of destabilising the population ratio of India also at work.
The first information report (FIR) of the present case, which was filed by NIA in December last year, mentioned that Indian racketeers in collusion with their Bangladeshi counterparts were “inducing” Rohingya Muslims and Bangladeshi Muslims to enter India illegally through porous border passages in Assam, Mizoram, Meghalaya and West Bengal using forged documents.
Once they enter India, the accused and their co-conspirators transport these illegal immigrants to different parts of the country using their contacts, it had said.
“These infiltrated foreign nationals mix up with the common masses in the long run and settle in India permanently. There is a well-designed larger conspiracy to exploit the illegal migrants and also to destabilise the population ratio and demographic scenario of the country,” the FIR read.
The NIA registered the case in Guwahati based on directions from the Union Home ministry following information about the racket. The ministry order of December 23 last year stated that the “gravity of the offence” has “national and international ramifications”.
In September last year, the NIA office in Guwahati had registered a case against nine Rohingyas from Myanmar and Aman Ullah, a resident of Jammu. It was alleged that Shabuddin, a resident of the Hojai district of Assam, had facilitated the entry of illegal foreigners to India and was trafficking them to Delhi to settle them in various parts of the country. All the accused were arrested from Guwahati railway station when they were about to board a train. Of the nine Rohingyas, seven were women. The NIA case was registered under sections 120(b), 370, and 371 of the penal code, section 14 of the Foreigners Act and section 6(a) of the Passport Act.
The NIA is at present also probing the alleged indoctrination of youth from Assam to join terror outfits and create a base for Al Qaida in India. The agency had arrested five persons, four from Barpeta district and one belonging to Narayanganj district of Bangladesh, earlier this year.
The Bangladeshi national, Saiful Islam, allegedly entered India illegally and was working as an Arabic teacher in a mosque in the Barpeta district. He is accused of leading a module of the Ansarullah Bangla Team, a Bangladesh-based Muslim terror outfit affiliated to Al Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent. Islam is alleged to have motivated youth to join the terror outfit.
