Bangladesh Border Guard (BGB) on Monday handed over an Indian couple, identified among 23 individuals who were pushed across the Chapsar border in Thakurgaon on Saturday, to their counterparts inIndia's Border Security Force (BSF).

The couple were named as Fajer Mandal (21) of Hariharpur village in North 24 Parganas, a district in India's bordering West Bengal state, and his wife Tashlima Mandal (19).

13 push-ins detained by BGB in Moulvibazar

They were pushed in on 14 June, assumed to be all Bangladeshis. Later during the verification process, the Mandals were found to be Indians.

The couple was handed over through a flag meeting at the company commander level of the 87th battalion of the BSF at 7pm on Monday, in the border pillar 349/5-S area.

Earlier, on June 14, BSF pushed 23 people (5 men, 12 women, and 6 children) through the border pillar 347/1-S of the Chapsar BOP in Haripur, Thakurgaon, under the jurisdiction of the 42nd Battalion of the BGB in Dinajpur.

Later, the BGB detained them. After verification and selection, the citizenship of 21 of the 23 detainees was confirmed as Bangladeshi, and the BGB handed them over to the Haripur police station in Thakurgaon district.

BGB rescues kidnapped Bangladeshi citizen from Myanmar 

SInce May 7, the Indian government has been implementing a controversial deportation policy for illegal or undocumented immigrants from Bangladesh, whereby the individuals are brought near the Bangladesh border in states like Tripura or West Bengal, that share borders with Bangladesh, and then pushed across. 

Till the first week of June, over 1000 individuals had been  pushed across like this. While most of them were found to be Bangladeshi, some have turned out to be Indians without proper paperwork, and therre have also been some Rohingyas displaced from Myanmar, who were registered by the UN as residents of camps in India.