Rohingya refugee Rojiya Begum will “never forget” the phone call she received from India two years ago. Her 12-year-old daughter, who had gone missing from their refugee camp in Bangladesh eight days before, had been found by the Indian police in New Delhi.
Hamida had been lured from the camp where she lived to India with the promise of “a better life” by two Rohingya men. The traffickers initially demanded £65 in ransom from the mother of four – a tiny sum in western terms but one which she could only raise by begging from door to door.
Rohingya refugees continue to flee Bangladesh for India and other neighbouring countries to escape the congested, unhygienic camps where they face threats of violence and have limited access to employment or higher education.
Many of those trafficked are Rohingya women and girls like Hamida, who are sold to Indian men as brides, says a 2023 report by Refugees International and The Azadi Project.
When Rojiya was called by a relative and told that Hamida had been found and her traffickers had been arrested by the New Delhi police, she was about to breathe a sigh of relief.
But then, the relative added: “Rojiya, they also arrested Hamida. She is in detention.”
She’s not alone. According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), 730 of the 908 asylum-seekers currently detained in India are Rohingya refugees.
Rojiya says did not know how to help Hamida – who spoke no language besides her native Rohingya.
“I reached out to everyone I could for help,” she said. “The Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust officers, the UN protection team, the Camp in Charge at Balukhali [one of the many Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar] … I pleaded with them to bring my daughter back to Bangladesh.”
Rojiya would not see her daughter again until March this year when a video message from Her relative in India arrived showing Hamida’s lifeless corpse enveloped in white shroud inside an ambulance.
Since Hamida had been detained in India, she had been in the care of the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO), a government agency under the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs.
“They took Hamida’s body for an autopsy, but did not release it to us for almost three weeks afterward,” Sabera Khatoon, a relative told The Telegraph in the New Deli slum where she lives with her family and dozens of other Rohingya refugees.
“According to the Islamic rule, we wanted to perform the burial as soon as possible. I used to travel to the UN and FRRO offices every day, begging them to release my cousin’s body. But they did nothing to help us,” she said.
The Indian law says that an autopsy or a postmortem examination is mandatory when the death of a person occurs in government custody. The procedure can take anytime between a few hours to almost a day, and is usually performed within two to three working days after the death.
The body should be released to the next of kin, their representative or the funeral director immediately after the autopsy, according to the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s bereavement information pack on India.
What killed Hamida?
“Not only did they mysteriously keep Hamida’s body for so long, but they also never gave us her postmortem report or any prior medical records despite multiple requests,” Sabera said.
The Telegraph tracked down a medical professional who had verified information on Hamida’s autopsy, which was performed at a government hospital in New Delhi.
The source revealed that although the autopsy determined that Hamida had died from “derangement” of internal organs – also known as multiple-organ failure – the actual cause of her death is subject to chemical analysis of the tissue sample taken from her body.
According to a copy of the autopsy report obtained by The Telegraph, a police report handed to the hospital before the autopsy said Hamida had been on medication for seizure disorder while in detention. The report noted that no documentation was available regarding the diagnosis.
The Telegraph interviewed eight Rohingya former detainees who lived with Hamida at a detention centre called Sewa Sadan in the Shehzada Bagh neighbourhood of New Delhi. Six of them were still detained there at the time of her death.
The refugees said that Hamida had never experienced a seizure while at Sewa Sadan – a place where all the detained women and girls stayed in a singular congested bedroom while the men and boys were packed into another.
Hamida’s mother Rojiya corroborated the statement, saying that her daughter had been “a perfectly healthy child” even before leaving Bangladesh, and never experienced any symptom of epilepsy.
Hamida was not the only Rohingya detainee in India who may have been given drugs she was not supposed to take.
Fifteen other Rohingya refugees previously detained in separate detention centres across New Delhi, including Sewa Sadan, told The Telegraph that they were regularly given food with “a suspicious medicine mixed in it”.
“After having my meals in the detention centre, I felt unusually drowsy and almost intoxicated,” said a formerly detained Rohingya refugee man who requested anonymity. “My thinking abilities did not work much while I was in there.”
Several former detainees also mentioned that the food inhibited any kind of sexual desire, too.
“If I refused to eat the food in which they mixed drugs, the staff would beat me up,” said a Rohingya refugee woman who asked to remain anonymous.
The 2023 report by Refugees International and The Azadi Project also mentions the practice of deliberately contaminating meals in detention centres housing Rohingya refugees.
Quoted in the report, a Rohingya woman who had been detained in India for 18 months said that the staff at the detention centre “mix something in the food” that made them all sick.
India-based Rohingya activist Sabber Kaw Min said that the practice of drugging detainees may be to incapacitate them to “protect the authorities and their misdoings”.
“If the detainees are not in a normal condition because of drugging, they would be unable to communicate properly with their friends and family members outside. They would be unable to get the word out regarding any abuses. They would not be able to fight back.
“And, it would make women and girls inside an easier target for any sexual predator who may target them inside,” said the co-founder of the non-profit Rohingya Human Rights Initiative.
Extreme medical negligence?
For Hamida, even the chemical analysis report may not yield concrete answers, say experts.
“The analysis can take up to a year or longer from the time of the autopsy,” said a New Delhi-based professor of forensic medicine, who chose to remain anonymous citing possible retaliation from authorities. “Even then, the results may be vague, as doctors do not know what specific drug to requisition when the viscera is preserved and sent for chemical analysis,” he said, referring to testing for a drug overdose.
Rohingya refugee Robi Alom, 27, and his younger sister Roma had been with Hamida when she died on the night of March 24 this year. The siblings had first met the girl at a railway station in Dhaka, the day they had all been setting off for India.
Robi said that Hamida became a “little sister” to them, and the two men with her never revealed why they were travelling with the girl.
Robi, alongside several other former detainees who knew Hamida, said that she had never been seriously ill until the week she died.
“But, two days before her death, she had a fever and was throwing up. She also complained of urinary retention,” said Robi, now resettled in a European country, over a telephone interview.
“I was with her when the authorities took Hamida to a small hospital near the detention centre. The doctor there wrote her a prescription saying that she was in a very critical state and must be shifted immediately to a better-equipped government hospital,” Robi said.
The FRRO staff who were on duty that day denied Hamida urgent medical treatment, Robi added.
“They forced her to go back to the detention centre instead of taking her to the hospital. They said they would take her there two days later, and that she was just pretending to be too ill.”
The next day, Robi says Hamida was in a “horrible state” and was wailing in pain.
“They finally called an ambulance for her after sunset. But it was too late. She stopped breathing on the way to the hospital and was declared dead upon arrival,” Robi said, his voice breaking with emotion. “She was screaming in tears for her parents – particularly her mother – before she died.”
A former Rohingya detainee, who had also been accompanying Hamida at the time of her death, said that in most cases, detainees asking for medical help are turned down by the FRRO and Indian police officials on duty at detention centres.
“They claim we are being ‘dramatic’ and pretending to be sick. Even if they take us to the doctors sometimes, we are never allowed to communicate directly with them. It is always the police officer accompanying us who takes the doctor aside and speaks for us,” he said, echoing a statement in the Refugees International and The Azadi Project report. “Often, the police officer uses racist slurs while talking about us to the doctor.”
“Usually, when one of us gets so ill that death is a possibility, the authorities release the person to escape any liability. I don’t know the exact cause of Hamida’s death, but the FRRO is to blame for not saving her in time by denying urgent medical treatment,” added the man who is now resettled in North America.
A Rohingya refugee woman who was in detention for over a year at Sewa Sadan said that the FRRO released her at a stage when she was physically too weak to walk.
“I was so weak and paralysed that my relatives had to carry me out of the detention centre in their arms. The FRRO did nothing to treat my illness, and let me go when they were scared something worse might happen to me,” she told The Telegraph, requesting anonymity, adding that the UNHCR and FRRO “forbade” them from speaking to the media.
Illnesses like tuberculosis, urinary issues and skin diseases are rampant in detention centres, said Ali Johar, another India-based Rohingya activist.
“The hygiene and sanitation conditions inside are extremely poor and the refugees are not provided with adequately nutritious food,” said the other co-founder of Rohingya Human Rights Initiative.
Death threats
Hamida, despite being an unaccompanied minor who was apparently trafficked, was declared an “illegal migrant” without “following the due process established by law”, said New Delhi-based lawyer Chatterji.
“On the face of it, this appears to be a re-victimisation of an alleged victim of persecution and human trafficking which constitute some of the gravest crimes against humanity,” said Chatterji, who argues against indefinite detention of Rohingya refugees as a lawyer.
A Rohingya refugee family told The Telegraph that Hamida’s death was used to threaten them against seeking legal remedies in the Supreme Court for some of their relatives’ indefinite detention in New Delhi.
“FRRO officials contacted us and said that if we filed a case in the Supreme Court, they would kill our family members who were in detention. They said, ‘Your family will be next. They will die the way Hamida Begum did.’ We were so terrified that we immediately cut off our lawyers,” said a member of the family, opting to remain unidentified to protect their safety.
The Ministry of Home Affairs did not respond to repeated requests for a comment from The Telegraph on Hamida’s case and the allegations of medical negligence and death threats.
John Quinley, director at non-governmental rights organisation Fortify Rights, said that reports of Rohingya refugees receiving death threats by authorities are “abhorrent”.
“We have found that detention conditions are overcrowded and referrals for medical treatment are very difficult. Furthermore, we have documented several cases of Rohingya refugees being beaten in detention,” he said.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Human Discrimination (CERD) in July this year said that it was “alarmed” by reports of arbitrary mass detention of Rohingya refugees in India, including children, in some cases without access to the due process or legal representation.
In an official response to The Telegraph, the UNHCR in India said that it “deeply regrets the death of Hamida Begum while in detention”.
“For UNHCR, seeking asylum is not a crime, an individual’s status as an asylum seeker or refugee is therefore not a valid basis for detention.
“Currently, UNHCR has limited access to detention. UNHCR stands ready to work with the Government of India on a principled approach to address the situation of all asylum seekers and refugees held in detention,” said a spokesperson for UNHCR India.
Gazing at a photo of Hamida on her family mobile phone at their shanty home in Cox’s Bazar, Rojiya burst into tears again.
“I haven’t slept a full night since she was taken away. Every time I go out, I look for her, hoping to see a child like my Hamida … but I never do,” said Rojiya, who escaped the 2017 genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar by fleeing to Dhaka with her family.
“My beautiful daughter is gone, and no one has been held accountable for her death. I can never forgive the Indian government for what they did to her. She was only 14. Allah sees everything. He will certainly bring those responsible to justice.”
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