The Manipur police have caught a 60-year-old woman with a Chennai connection for attempting to smuggle in nine Myanmar nationals with fake Aadhaar and voter identity cards.
The arrest of the nine in Manipur’s border town Moreh on Sunday follows that of 24 Bangladeshi nationals in Tripura. The 24 were caught at Agartala railway station after getting off a train that arrived from New Delhi on May 10.
Police in Manipur’s Tengnoupal district said Paritha Begum, a resident of Sriram Nagar in Chennai, was among 10 people caught travelling in two vans with forged documents.
“Inquiry revealed the woman from Chennai is part of an international human trafficking network. All the nine Myanmarese with fake Aadhaar cards are from Yangon state in Myanmar, and two of them are into trafficking,” S. Ibomcha, Tengnoupal district’s superintendent of police, told reporters.
The police also tracked down two Moreh-based traders — one into software and the other into online ticketing — who had forged the nine Aadhaar cards between them.
The police raided the residence and shop of the duo and recovered several Aadhaar cards, biometric finger scan machine, laminating machine, laptops and printers besides other “incriminating documents”.
The online ticketing agent, identified as Gopal Krishna, had procured train tickets for the 10 arrested people to Chennai from Dimapur in Nagaland.
Referring to the arrest of the nine Myanmar nationals, Manipur Chief Minister Nongthombam Biren Singh on Tuesday evening said the possibility of foreigners moving around with fake Aadhaar was a serious issue.
“We perhaps need to verify all Aadhaar cards, as we have a small population and such illegal migration raises serious issues,” Mr. Singh said.
He mooted the idea of checking the credentials of passengers arriving at Imphal’s Tulihal Airport.
