Six more Bangladeshi nationals held in Tripura

Agartala, Nov 25 (IANS) The Border Security Force (BSF) troopers apprehended six Bangladeshi nationals including women and children in Tripura on Monday, officials said.

A BSF spokesman said that BSF troops of BOP Murtichera in Unakoti district apprehended three Bangladeshi nationals while they were trying to exfiltrate to Bangladesh.

Apprehended Bangladeshi nationals are residents of the Kamalbazar area of the Sylhet division.

The spokesman said that in another operation BSF troops apprehended three Bangladeshi nationals, including a woman and a child from northern Tripura.

Adopting a non-lethal strategy BSF troops successfully foiled several attempts of smuggling and seized contraband worth Rs 10 lakhs, he said.

According to the spokesman, in one such operation, a Bangladeshi smuggler reportedly sustained pallet injury by BSF firing from non-lethal weapons.

BSF is maintaining a high level of alertness on the international border to prevent infiltration and trans-border crime, he pointed out.

On November 22, the BSF accompanied by the Railway Protection Force (RPF) of Northeast Frontier Railway and the Government Railway Police (GRP) arrested 16 nationals including women and minors of the neighbouring country.

These infiltrators confessed that they had entered India via the Sonamura border in the Sepahijala district with the help of an intermediary and were similarly planning to travel to Delhi in search of jobs.

Over the last four months, around 520 Bangladeshi nationals and over 63 Rohingyas were arrested by the GRP, Border Security Force (BSF), and Tripura Police from the Agartala railway station and various other places in Tripura after they illegally entered India.

The Rohingyas illegally entered India after fleeing their camps in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazar where more than one million displaced Rohingyas from Myanmar have been living since 2017.

After the Bangladesh unrest began in June-July, BSF enhanced surveillance along the 4,096-km border with the neighbouring country to prevent trans-border crime and infiltration, the BSF officials said.

Five Indian states – West Bengal (2216 km), Tripura (856 km), Meghalaya (443 km), Mizoram (318 km) and Assam ( 263 km) share a border with Bangladesh.

--IANS

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