Representative image of Border Security Force personnel during a patrol along the India-Bangladesh border. | Photo: AFP
The Odisha Police on Friday said they had officially informed the family of Muntaz Khan that he and his two elderly siblings were deported to Bangladesh on December 24, more than a month after the family reported them missing following their detention in Kendrapara district.
In a written communication to the family, the police said that Muntaz Khan, 63, his brother Insaan Khan, 59, and their sister Ameena Bibi, 70, were identified as Bangladeshi nationals after what it described as due verification. The note stated that the three were handed over to the Border Security Force at Seemanagar in West Bengal’s Nadia district and subsequently transferred to the Bangladesh Police on December 24. It added that “as per practice in vogue”, the deportation took place in the presence of police personnel and Intelligence Bureau officials, Scroll.in reported.
The intimation came weeks after the family alleged that they had received no information about the whereabouts of the three elderly relatives. Scroll had earlier reported that the siblings were forced out of India, a claim confirmed by the Kendrapara superintendent of police on January 14. The officer had said the three had ‘confessed’ to being Bangladeshi nationals.
According to the police, authorities in West Bengal were contacted to verify the family’s assertion that the siblings were Indian citizens, but the verification could not be completed. However, the superintendent of police of West Bengal’s Purba Medinipur district, Mitun Kumar Dey, rejected this claim, saying no such request had been received and that neither district intelligence officials nor local police had been approached.
The procedure issued by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in May requires officials to give a suspected undocumented immigrant 30 days to establish citizenship and to seek verification from the person’s home state.
On November 27, the Odisha Police detained 12 members of the family from Garapur village on suspicion that they were Bangladeshi citizens. Nine of them, including Muntaz Khan’s son Mukhtar Khan, were released after nine days. The three elderly siblings were not released and were later reported missing from a college hostel where they had been held.
Mukhtar Khan, born in India in 1979, was freed after police concluded that he was an Indian citizen by birth, in line with citizenship rules for those born in India between 1950 and July 1, 1987. The police, however, maintained that Muntaz Khan was Bangladeshi, alleging that his father, Yasin Khan, had migrated from Bangladesh in the 1970s.
The family has disputed this claim, producing land records from 1956 showing Yasin Khan as a cultivator in Purba Medinipur district, along with voter lists from 2002, Aadhaar cards and land documents in the names of the expelled siblings.
This was at least the second instance of a Bengali Muslim family being expelled to Bangladesh by the Odisha government. Earlier in January, Scroll reported that 14 members of another family, including a 90-year-old woman, were detained in Jagatsinghpur district and forced out of India in December.