‘Has he been deported?’: A UP Muslim family searches for man ‘detained’ in post-Pahalgam crackdown

On April 26, four days after the Pahalgam terror attack, Liyakat Ali was sleeping at his home in Ahmedabad’s Chandola Talav slum when a posse of policemen knocked on his door. It was 4 am.

Ali and five other members of his family were asked to step out. For the next four hours, they were made to sit in a football ground nearby.

Hundreds of other residents in the neighbourhood had been similarly rounded up as a part of a drive to identify illegal Bangladeshi migrants.

Around 8 am, the women were let go. The men were paraded on the streets and made to walk to a police station 3 km away.

That was the last time Hamida bano, Ali’s sister-in-law, saw him. The 51-year-old native of Uttar Pradesh’s Barabanki district has been missing since.

Ali’s family members fear that he might have been deported to Bangladesh as he has not turned up in two months.

On May 8, as Scroll had reported, around 78 undocumented migrants from Bangladesh, all detained in Ahmedabad, were allegedly flown out of India in a military aircraft and then “pushed” across the water into Bangladesh, a police report in Bangladesh’s Satkhira town claimed.

“He is mentally ill and keeps to himself,” said Muzaffarali Shaikh, his elder brother. “We fear he may not have...

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