Agartala : Twentyfour more Mayanmarese, including six women and 12 children, have been arrested for illegally entering Tripura, police said on Sunday.
Two Indians, including a resident of Kashmir, were also arrested along with the foreigners.
“Acting on a tip off, 24 Myanmareses were arrested from a house at Meleghar in western Tripura on Saturday,” police officer Ashok Kumar Sinha said.
The house owner, Kurban Ali, and a Kashmiri youth, Amir Hossain, were arrested too.
With the arrest, the total number of Myanmarese held in the state in the past two years has risen to 125. Most entered India looking for work.
“They told police that they are recognised as refugees by the UNHCR (United Nations refugee agency),” the official said.
The Myanmar nationals would be presented before a court on Monday and then it would be decided whether they should be pushed back to Bangladesh or jailed.
The Myanmarese told police that following the ethnic violence in Mayanmar, they left the country four years ago and worked in Kashmir. They came to Tripura in search of jobs, Sinha added.
More than 50,000 Myanmarese have been living in different parts of neighbouring Mizoram, which borders Myanmar and Bangladesh, and working at shops and factories after obtaining work permits.
Since the mid-1990s, over 225,000 Myanmar nationals, mostly Rohingya Muslims, have been living in the Teknaf region in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district.
Tripura, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Assam share an 1,880 km border with Bangladesh, while Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh share a 1,640 km unfenced border with Myanmar.