304 Rohingyas settled in five districts of UP: Report

Lucknow: More than 304 Rohingyas have been found to have settled in Uttar Pradesh.

A confidential note prepared by the state police and sent to the state government on Tuesday says that 304 Rohingya people were scattered in five western UP districts —Aligarh, Mathura, Saharanpur, Muzaffarnagar and Meerut. The report will now be forwarded to the ministry of home affairs in Delhi.

According to sources, the exercise to identify Rohingya was initiated discreetly by the Central and state intelligence units soon after chief minister Yogi Adityanath made it clear in a meeting that Rohingya people were not refugees but “intruders”.

The Rohingya group living in UP is said to be “different” from those staying in camps set up with the support of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

UNHCR has issues cards to registered refugees to ensure that they are not arbitrarily arrested or prosecuted.

A senior police official disclosed that in the next phase, security agencies in UP will try to ascertain the period of stay of the identified Rohingya people in the five districts and find out how they managed to sneak into the country and UP.

According to sources, some Rohingya families came to UP from Jammu and Kashmir in the past two months after they started facing heat due to protests by different political outfits there.