Police and Childline officials rescued 11 girls soon after they were brought in here from a Bru refugee camp in north Tripura on Wednesday. A middle aged man who escorted the girls in a vehicle bearing Meghalaya registration number was arrested.
The girls were inmates of a Mizoram Bru refugee camp at Gachiram Para in the Kanchanpur subdivision. Some 34,000 refugees have been housed in six makeshift camps in Kanchanpur for the past 24 years.
The refugees are now getting settlement in 12 different places in Tripura in pursuance with the quadripartite pact of the Ministry of Home Affairs with Tripura, Mizoram governments and leaders of the Bru refugees signed in January 2020.
“We have rescued 11 girls from the Chandrapur bus terminus. Two of the girls are aged 18,” said Childline counsellor Olivia Naha.
She said the girls were shifted to a shelter home and would be handed over to their parents after completing formalities.
A woman police officer said they had detained Piangliana Reang, who escorted the girls in the vehicle. The man claimed that the girls were to be engaged as domestic help at several houses in the Nandan Nagar locality here.
He further claimed that he had the consent of poor parents of the girls to bring them to Agartala.
Police said the matter could be related to human trafficking and was being investigated.
