Human traffickers have West Bengal authorities on tenterhooks

Kolkata, Dec 19 On Friday, the Uttar Pradesh Anti-Terrorist Squad (UP-ATS) arrested one Ratan Mandal from West Bengal. He was carrying a Rs 25,000 reward on his head. Two mobile phones, Aadhaar card, health, PAN, e-shram and ATM cards, semi-finished or completely made stamps of various banks and one computer were recovered from the accused.

The ATS said that Ratan Mandal was a key facilitator of the gang which illegally brings Bangladeshis, Rohingyas to India and then gets their Indian passports made using fake Hindu identities and thereafter sends them abroad.

This is not an isolated case. In the last three months the UP-ATS along with the Kolkata-Special Task Force has made a series of arrests mostly facilitators who have smoothened the illegal entry of Bangladeshis and Rohingyas into the country particularly through the North Bengal border, giving a cause of worry for the police and the administration.

In the first week of December this year the UP-ATS and the Kolkata STF in a joint operation arrested two Rohingyas, Noor Alam and Mohammad Jameel from Kolkata, for forging documents and helping the illegal entry of Bangladeshis and Rohingyas into India and abroad.

Sources in the STF said that both the accused Noor Alam and Mohammad Jameel made fake Indian passports with Hindu identities for Rohingyas and Bangladeshis and sent them to different countries of the world. The arrests were made after interrogating four people Mithun Mandal, Shaon Ahmed, Mominur Islam and Mahendi Hasan who were arrested in October for trafficking Bangladeshi and Myanmar citizens.

In November, the UP-ATS had arrested Sameer Mandal (45) of South 24 Parganas district of West Bengal, and Vikram Singh from Hoshiarpur in Punjab who were involved in an international human trafficking racket that spread across South Africa and London.

On October 26, Mithun Mandal, Shaon Ahmed, Mominur Islam and Mahendi Hasan were apprehended from Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Railway Station, Mughalsarai in the same human trafficking case.

More worrying is that a week before the UP-ATS and Kolkata STF in a joint operation arrested 21 Bangladeshi men who illegally entered West Bengal and were residing at Anandapur on the outskirts of Kolkata.

The arrests were made from a residential building in Gulshan Colony after a team of officers from the anti-terrorist squad (ATS) of the Uttar Pradesh police came from Lucknow to trace Mufizul Rehman, an alleged human trafficker, a Kolkata police STF officer said on condition of anonymity.

Although such arrests of illegal immigrants from Bangladesh is not uncommon in Bengal, so many people have not been held in Kolkata during a single raid in recent years, the officer added.

"The youths were living in an apartment that was used to run a madrassa. None of them had valid passports or visas but some fake Indian identity cards were seized during the raid," an officer said.

Though the investigators are yet to connect the illegal immigration with any kind of terror design but what is keeping the investigators and the agencies on tenterhooks is the lockdown and the subsequent unemployment which is making the work of these terror groups easier. Taking advantage of the porous border with Bangladesh and unemployment, international terror groups like JMB, Ansarullah Faction and even Islamic State are trying to spread their network in the state. The aim is to make West Bengal the headquarters of terror activities in entire eastern India.

Sometimes through direct interaction and at times online, they are targeting intelligent but unemployed young boys and girls in the state. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the Special Task Force (STF) of Kolkata Police got this information from the three JMB terrorists who were arrested by the STF sleuths recently from a colony on the southern outskirts of Kolkata. Officials are worried that because of systematic brainwashing by these terror groups many meritorious but unemployed youths are dropping out of mainstream society.

"The brainwashing of meritorious but unemployed youth is such a problem that cannot be tackled by any police or anti-terror agency. Only police personnel at the grassroots level can tackle this problem to some extent. The state police authorities should give special training to the constable level personnel on these lines. But unfortunately, this system is not followed in West Bengal where the police are running short of personnel and hence they are mainly involved in tackling only law and order problems. Very few of them are trained or equipped to tackle the sleeper cells," a senior official of the Home Department said.

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