BSF ‘humane’ plea to push back boys rejected

From The Telegraph

OUR CORRESPONDENT

The Bangladeshi boys being taken to the juvenile justice board in Raiganj on Monday. Picture by Nantu Dey Raiganj, July 26: The state juvenile justice board here today rejected a BSF plea to push back three Bangladeshi minors, saying that it did not have any “jurisdiction” on the matter. The plea comes three days after the border guards caught the boys along with two others in Songaon. The BSF had submitted an application to the board which has an office in Karnajora to grant them permission to push back the three “on humanitarian grounds”. The three minor boys, two of them aged 10 and another eight, have been kept at Suryodaya, a government home in Raiganj. Jashwant Singh, the deputy inspector-general of the BSF here, said the five boys were picked up on last Friday evening. The jawans patrolling at Songaon, about 25km from here, found their movement inside Indian territory suspicious. “Two of the five were above 18 years and they were produced in court after they were handed over to the police. Since we realised that the three others were minors, we waited till Monday for the juvenile justice board office to open. We are trying our best to talk to our counterparts in Bangladesh so that the minor boys can be returned home,” Singh added. Inspector in-charge of Raiganj police station Sujit Ghosh said the two others — Mohammad Paria, 22, and Mohammad Mutul Rehman, 20 — had been sent to judicial custody. The BSF had alleged that all of them were guilty of cutting the border fencing and entering India, Ghosh said. One of the minor boys said they were all residents of Meenapur village in Thakurgaon district of Bangladesh. “Around 10 or 15 of us were fishing in a pond adjacent to the border on Friday evening. We had strayed close to the fence in search of a better catch. We were sitting and catching fish and a BSF jawan had been watching us. Suddenly he came and caught the five of us and handed us over to the police,” he recounted. The minor boy said he was a student of Class III in a primary school and missed his English test today. The three minors were taken to the office of the juvenile justice board’s office on Suryodaya’s campus around 4pm today. Sikha Moitra, a member of three-member board, said: “The BSF’s appeal could not be taken up as the board does not have the jurisdiction on these matter. However, we are treating this as a special case and the minors will be produced before us on August 5.”