Irrawaddy-July 14
A premier Indian investigating agency has busted a sprawling network for trafficking Rohingya girls from the refugee camps of Bangladesh to India. The charge sheet submitted by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to a court in Guwahati has given lurid details about the network spanning several cities across India from the border states in the northeastern region to Jammu in the north. So far six persons have been arrested in connection with the episode and remanded to judicial custody after they were produced before the court in Guwahati last month. The First Information Report (FIR) registered by the agency last year mentions that not only Rohingya refugees but also Bangladeshi nationals had entered India illegally through multiple porous stretches along the international border in India’s frontier zone of the northeast and West Bengal. Kumkum Ahmed Choudhury, who was among the arrested, was the kingpin of the trafficking racket perceived by the agency to have been a “well-designed larger conspiracy to exploit the illegal migrants and also to destabilize the population ratio and demographic scenario of the country [India].”
Ahmed operated from Bangalore in association with Sahalam Laskar in Jammu and Raju Ali who was based in Bangladesh, according to the chargesheet. The process also involved providing fake identity and travel documents to the victims before they were handed over to employers. Over a million Rohingya refugees are sheltered at refugee camps in Bangladesh’s coastal district of Cox’s Bazar. They were compelled to leave their homes in Rakhine State in Myanmar over many decades beginning from the late 1970s. Read more at: https://www.irrawaddy.com/news/burma/india-unearths-network-trafficking-rohingya-girls-from-camps-in-bangladesh.html
