The Odisha Police on Friday formally informed the family of Muntaz Khan that he and his two elderly siblings had been deported to Bangladesh on December 24. This came more than a month after they were reported missing, following their detention by the police in Kendrapara district.

In a written intimation issued to the family, the police stated that 63-year-old Muntaz Khan, his 59-year-old brother Insaan Khan and their 70-year-old sister Ameena Bibi had been identified as Bangladeshis after “due verification”.

The document, seen by Scroll, added that the three persons had been handed over to the Border Security Force at Seemanagar in West Bengal’s Nadia district and were transferred to the Bangladesh Police on December 24.

It stated that the three siblings had been deported “as per practice in vogue”, in the presence of the police and officials from the intelligence bureau.

The intimation was issued weeks after the family said they had been kept in the dark about the whereabouts of the three elderly relatives.

Scroll had reported on Wednesday that the three persons were forced out of India and into Bangladesh, as confirmed by the Kendrapara superintendent of police on January 14.

The three had “confessed” to being Bangladeshis, the police officer had claimed.

He also said that the Odisha Police had contacted the authorities in West Bengal to verify the family’s claims that the three persons were Indian citizens. The authorities in Bengal had failed to verify the claims, the Odisha Police officer had told Scroll.

The procedure laid down by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in May requires the authorities to give a suspected undocumented immigrant 30 days to prove his or her citizenship, and ask the person’s home state to verify the claim.

However, Mitun Kumar Dey, the superintendent of police of West Bengal’s Purba Medinipur district, had denied receiving such a verification request, saying that neither the district intelligence nor the local police had been contacted by the Odisha Police.

“I completely rule out the claim of Odisha Police,” Dey had told Scroll.

On November 27, the Odisha Police picked up 12 members of the family from Garapur village on suspicion of being Bangladeshi citizens. Nine of them, including Muntaz Khan’s son Mukhtar Khan, were released after being detained for nine days.

However, the three elderly siblings were not released and were later found to be missing from a college hostel where they had been held.

Mukhtar Khan, who was born in India in 1979, was released after the police said he was an Indian citizen by birth. According to Indian citizenship rules, a person born in India after 1950 but before July 1, 1987, becomes a citizen by birth.

However, Muntaz Khan, the Odisha Police claimed, was a Bangladeshi because his father, Yasin Khan, had allegedly arrived in India from Bangladesh in the 1970s.

The family disputes this and showed Scroll land records from 1956 showing Yasin Khan as a cultivator in Purba Medinipur district, as well as voter lists from 2002, Aadhaar cards and land documents in the names of the expelled siblings.

This is at least the second Bengali Muslim family that the Odisha government has expelled to Bangladesh. As Scroll reported earlier in January, 14 members of a family, including a 90-year-old woman, were picked up from Jagatsinghpur district and forced out of India in December.

Since April, several persons have been forced into Bangladesh after they allegedly could not prove their Indian citizenship. In some cases, persons who were mistakenly sent to Bangladesh returned to the country after the state authorities in India proved that they were Indians.

Also read: Son declared Indian, but father, uncle and aunt pushed into Bangladesh