The Odisha Police have formally informed the family of Muntaz Khan that he and his two elderly siblings were deported to Bangladesh on December 24, more than a month after the three were reported missing following their detention in Kendrapara district, Scroll reported.
In a written intimation sent to the family, the police said that Muntaz Khan (63), his brother Insaan Khan (59), and their sister Ameena Bibi (70) were identified as Bangladeshi nationals after what the authorities described as “due verification”. The document stated that the siblings were handed over to the Border Security Force at Seemanagar in West Bengal’s Nadia district and subsequently transferred to the Bangladesh Police.
According to the police, the deportation was carried out “as per practice in vogue” and in the presence of police and Intelligence Bureau officials. The intimation came weeks after the family said they were kept in the dark about the whereabouts of the three relatives.
Earlier, the Kendrapara superintendent of police had told Scroll that the siblings had been forced out of India and claimed they had “confessed” to being Bangladeshi citizens. He also said that the Odisha Police had contacted West Bengal authorities to verify the family’s claim that the three were Indian citizens, but that the verification could not be completed.
However, this account was disputed by West Bengal officials. Mitun Kumar Dey, the superintendent of police of Purba Medinipur district, said no verification request had been received from Odisha Police, adding that neither district intelligence nor local police had been contacted.
Under a procedure issued by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in May, authorities are required to give a suspected undocumented immigrant 30 days to prove citizenship and seek verification from the person’s home state before deportation.
The case began on November 27, when Odisha Police detained 12 members of the family from Garapur village on suspicion of being Bangladeshi nationals. Nine of them, including Muntaz Khan’s son Mukhtar Khan, were released after nine days. The three elderly siblings were not released and were later reported missing from a college hostel where they had been held.
Mukhtar Khan, born in India in 1979, was released after police accepted that he was an Indian citizen by birth. Indian law grants citizenship by birth to individuals born in India between 1950 and July 1, 1987. The police, however, claimed that Muntaz Khan was Bangladeshi, alleging that his father had migrated from Bangladesh in the 1970s.
The family disputes this claim and has produced land records from 1956 listing the father as a cultivator in Purba Medinipur district, along with voter lists, Aadhaar cards, and land documents in the names of the deported siblings.
This is at least the second instance in recent months of a Bengali Muslim family being expelled from Odisha to Bangladesh. In another case reported earlier this year, 14 members of a family, including a 90-year-old woman, were detained in Jagatsinghpur district and forced out of India in December.
Since April, several people have reportedly been pushed into Bangladesh after failing to prove Indian citizenship. In some cases, individuals later returned after Indian authorities confirmed they were citizens.