Guwahati, June 27
Three years after being labelled a ‘foreigner’ and sent to a detention camp in Assam, a 59-year-old woman has been released, with the police admitting she was a victim of mistaken identity and officials had picked up the wrong person.
Madhubala Mandal, a widow, returned home to her hearing-impaired daughter on Wednesday evening, shortly after being freed from a camp for illegal immigrants in Kokrajhar.
Visuals of a frail Mandal, looking older beyond her years, sitting with security personnel as she was driven to her home in Bishnupur were circulated widely as news spread about her being wrongly confined in a camp.
She was released after police admitted before a Foreigners’ Tribunal that they sent Mandal to the detention camp instead of a Madhumala Das who was declared a foreigner by the tribunal in 2016.
Both women belong to Bishnupur in Chirang district.
According to villagers, Madhumala Das and her husband Makhan Nama Das had died long before the tribunal had issued the notice.
In May, Kargil war veteran Mohammad Sanaullah was picked up and sent to a detention camp in Goalpara district after a tribunal declared him a ‘foreigner’.
Following his family’s writ petition along with an interlocutory application, the Gauhati High Court granted him bail and he was released from the detention camp.
Mandal’s release came on the day over one lakh people were excluded from the draft National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam after they were found ineligible, adding to the 40 lakh names left out of the list published on July 30 last year.
The list is being updated for the first time since 1951 to identify illegal migration into Assam. PTI
from The Tribune https://ift.tt/2X9rVyV
via Today’s News Headlines
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