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The Gujarat Police cracked down on illegal Bangladeshis in the state following the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22, in which 26 tourists, including three Gujaratis, were killed.
Rag-picking, begging at traffic signals, and working as manual labourers, mostly masons: these are some of the petty jobs that they took up for subsistence after arriving in Gujarat “for better livelihood opportunities”, the illegal Bangladeshi immigrants ‘in confinement’ following the demolitions at the Chandola Talav (lake) area in Ahmedabad this week have told the police as part of the ongoing investigation.
According to the Gujarat Police, however, the Chandola lake area, where most of the immigrants resided in encroachments, had become a hub of criminal activities “such as large-scale prostitution, including coercing minors into prostitution, drug trade, money laundering, forgery of identification documents”.
An affidavit filed before the Gujarat High Court earlier this week, challenging the residents’ petition to stay the demolitions, signed by Deputy Commissioner of Police (Crime) Ajit Rajiaan, stated, “Over time, the lake came to be used for a variety of illegalities, including harbouring Bangladeshi aliens and other anti-national elements…It is also stated for the record that, recently, four Bangladeshi immigrants belonging to an al-Qaeda module having links to Chandola Lake were also arrested.”
The affidavit follows a police crackdown on illegal Bangladeshi nationals in the state following the Pahalgam terror attack on April 22, in which 26 tourists, including three Gujaratis, were killed.
On Thursday night, the Vadodara district police placed 30 alleged Bangladeshi nationals ‘in confinement’ from Bhoj village in Padra taluka, where 29 of them had taken shelter in the house of a relative, after escaping the police crackdown in the Chandola lake area. One of them, a woman immigrant from Bangladesh, had been living in Bhoj following her marriage to a local.
Vadodara District Superintendent of Police (SP) Rohan Anand told The Indian Express, “A total of six men, nine women and 15 children were detained from Bhoj, and...