The New Nation - Internet Edition

Staff Reporter

Bangladeshi citizens numbering 787, who have been languishing in different prisons in the West Bengal state in India for last two and a half years due to legal complexities, are likely to return to the country as per the Foreign Ministry's initiative that covers travel arrangement for these ill-fated nationals, official sources said yesterday.

These Bangladeshis went to India for various purposes, including visiting their relatives in the next-door neighbour crossing the sprawling border legally or otherwise.

All of them ultimately landed in prisons. Many of them

lost their travel documents after being trapped by unscrupulous persons, while a number of them, including women and children, were smuggled by traffickers promising better employment, a rights group said in Dhaka yesterday.

A leader of Bangladesh National Women Lawyers Association (BNWLA), which helped repatriate many trafficked women and children from different parts of the neighbouring country and maintains contact with right groups in different countries, including India, said their friends in Kolkata brought issue to the knowledge of the central and the West Bengal governments in January this year, while the BNWLA informed the Bangladesh Government.

The West Bengal government sent a list of all the 787 Bangladeshi detinues, whose prison terms expired, to the Deputy High Commission of Bangladesh in Kolkata and requested Bangladesh authorities to make arrangement for their homecoming.

The Deputy High Commission (DHC) forwarded the list to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which ordered the Kolkata DHC to complete bilateral formalities so that Bangladeshi citizens could return home immediately, following a personal initiative by Foreign Affairs Adviser Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury.

A Foreign office source yesterday said, "This is going to be the single biggest incident of homecoming by Bangladeshi nationals (after scrutiny), who were detained in a foreign land in recent time."

The issue was also discussed at bilateral meetings in Dhaka and Delhi recently, he added.

Mohammad Emran, the Deputy High Commissioner of Bangladesh in Kolkata, told the private television channel-ATN Bangla-that the first batch of the detained Bangladeshi nationals would return home from the capital of West Bengal soon.