Guwahati: Assam Police have nabbed 18 Bangladesh infiltrators, including five children, in two separate operations in Guwahati in last 24 hours—thirteen of them having fled the crackdown by J& K Police against illegal nationals in Srinagar.The other five Bangladesh nationals, who are fresh infiltrators and arrived in the city through Meghalaya, were caught while they were trying to move to take a train to Mumbai.Police also arrested four Indians, including a hotel owner, for allegedly harbouring and facilitating the illegal immigrants’ stay and travel within India.In the first operation on Tuesday afternoon, four women and one man were caught at around during a routine checking of train coaches at Guwahati railway station by the border branch of Panbazar police station. They were found in the general coach of the Lokmanya Tilak Terminus Express (Train No. 15648), moments before it was scheduled to depart for Maharashtra at 3 pm.Police said three Aadhaar cards were recovered from their possession, of which only one was found to be genuine, belonging to a woman who, investigators learnt, had previously travelled to India and gotten married to someone in Gujarat.Police said that preliminary questioning revealed the group was headed to Mumbai in search of work, and all five confessed to being Bangladeshi nationals who had entered India illegally without valid documents, hailing from Dhaka, Bogura, Rajbari, Narail and Jamalpur districts of Bangladesh.Further interrogation revealed they had crossed into India illegally through the Meghalaya border by land, without travel or identity documents, and had been staying at Vintage Home, a hotel in Tokobari, before their onward journey.Citing the hotel’s role in harbouring the group and its suspected links to touts facilitating illegal Bangladeshi immigration, Panbazar police registered a case against the hotel’s owner and staff.In a second, unrelated operation on Wednesday afternoon, the border branch of the Guwahati Police Commissionerate raided another hotel based on a tip-off and apprehended 13 more Bangladeshi nationals comprising four men, four women and five children.The group told police that they had arrived in Guwahati in the morning morning from Delhi and was intending to return to Bangladesh.Police said that during questioning, they admitted to having lived illegally in India for the past 14 to 15 years near Pantha Chowk in Srinagar, and said they fled after Srinagar police launched a crackdown on illegal Bangladeshi residents in the city, prompting them to head to Guwahati en route back to their country of origin.Police said further legal action is being initiated for the expulsion of all apprehended individuals under the provisions of the Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950.
