Six Delhi-bound Myanmar nationals, including a woman, were detained by the Assam police at the state’s border with Mizoram, police said. The six Myanmarese, aged 19 to 23 years, were arrested at Lailapur on the Assam-Mizoram border along Cachar district on Friday night from a car. They had planned to go to Guwahati and then to Delhi by train.
A police official said that during the preliminary interrogation they confessed that they recently entered Mizoram from Myanmar’s Chin state through the Champhai border and now they were going to Delhi via Guwahati in search of jobs. Police recovered Rs 40,000 in Indian currency from them and also arrested the Indian driver of the car they had hired to go to Guwahati.
With this 46 Delhi bound Myanmarese have been detained in Assam and Manipur during the past 41 days. On October 1, 14 Delhi-bound Myanmar nationals, including a woman, were arrested by the security personnel at the Bir Tikendrajit International Airport in Imphal. On September 12, 26 Delhi-bound Myanmarese, including 10 women, were arrested from a private lodge at Rehabari after they arrived in Guwahati from Mizoram. Since March, around 11,500 Myanmar nationals have taken refuge in Mizoram after the declaration of a state of emergency in Myanmar on February 1.
Myanmar nationals, including Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar and from the refugee camps in Bangladesh, are often detained in different northeastern states after they illegally enter India in search of jobs or get trapped in human trafficking.
Four northeastern states — Manipur, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Mizoram — share 1,643 km unfenced borders with Myanmar. Four northeastern states of Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Assam share a 1,880-km border with Bangladesh. Vast stretches of the Bangladesh borders with the northeastern states remained unfenced.
