4 women, 1 minor among 11 Bangladeshis held in Tripura for illegal entry

Agartala: Amid tightened security along the India-Bangladesh borders, 11 more Bangladeshi nationals were arrested in Tripura for illegal entry into India, officials said on Friday.

Government Railway Police (GRP) officials said that eight Bangladeshi citizens including four women and a minor were arrested from the Agartala railway station on Thursday night before they boarded a Guwahati-bound train.

A Border Security Force (BSF) spokesman said that personnel of the border guarding force arrested three more Bangladeshi nationals and an Indian tout from Sabroom in southern Tripura on Thursday night.

GRP sources said that during the last two months, 102 foreign nationals including seven Rohingyas were arrested from the Agartala railway station.

On July 4, 25 Rohingyas, including six women and seven children, were arrested from North Tripura District when they were about to board buses to first go to Guwahati and then to Hyderabad.

Officials said that all the Bangladeshis and Rohingyas illegally entered Tripura to board trains or buses to go to other states in India “in search of jobs”.

Before illegally entering Tripura, the Rohingyas fled from their camps in Bangladesh's Cox's Bazaar, where more than one million displaced Rohingyas from Myanmar have been living since 2017.

Due to rising infiltration from across the border, Tripura Chief Minister Manik Saha during a high-level meeting last week, asked the top BSF and police officials to take appropriate measures to prevent infiltration, smuggling, illegal trade and border crimes.

BSF’s Tripura frontier Inspector General, Patel Piyush Purushottam Das, said that physical domination has been augmented with state-of-the-art surveillance technology, including Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled cameras and facial recognition tools along the 856 km India-Bangladesh border with Tripura to prevent infiltration, crimes and other illegal activities.