Rohingya refugees charge: 'India put us on boats like captives. Then we were thrown in the sea near Myanmar'

India picked up 40 Rohingya refugees living in squalid slums in Delhi, flew them to Andaman & Nicobar Islands, put them in boats, and left them in the sea 100 metres from the shores of civil war-ravaged Buddhist-majority Myanmar, the BBC claimed on August 29.

- BY S VENKAT NARAYAN

This happened on 6 May this year. The 40 Rohingya refugees, who had UNHCR refugee cards and lived in different parts of Delhi, were taken to their local police stations under the guise of collecting biometric data. This is a yearly process mandated by the Indian government where Rohingya refugees are photographed and fingerprinted. After several hours they were taken to the Inderlok Detention Centre in the city, they told the BBC.

The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim ethnic community. But of the 40 people forcibly returned in May, 15 are Christian.

Thousands of Rohingya live in squalid conditions in refugee camps in Delhi.

Three months after the 40 Rohingya were removed from India’s capital, the BBC managed to contact the refugees in Myanmar. Most are staying with the Ba Htoo Army (BHA), a resistance group fighting the military in the southwest of the country.

“We don’t feel secure in Myanmar. This place is a complete war zone,” Soyed Noor told the BBC on a video call made from the phone of a BHA member. He spoke from a wooden shelter with six other refugees around him.

The BBC gathered testimonies from the refugees and accounts from relatives in Delhi and spoke to experts investigating the allegations to piece together what happened to them.

The BBC says that they were flown from Delhi to an island in the Bay of Bengal, put on a naval vessel and eventually forced into the Andaman Sea with life jackets. They then made their way to shore and are now facing an uncertain future in Myanmar, which the mostly-Muslim Rohingya had fled in huge numbers in recent years to escape persecution.

On 7 May, the refugees said they were taken to Hindon airport, just east of Delhi, where they boarded planes to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, an Indian territory in the Bay of Bengal.