Noorul Amin last spoke with his brother on May 9. The phone was short, but the news was devastating.

He learned that his brother Kairul and four other relatives were 40 of the 40 Rohingya refugees deported to Myanmar by the Indian government, a country they suffered fear a few years ago.

Myanmar is in a brutal civil war between political fields – seized power in the 2021 coup – militia and resistance.

Mr. Amin’s chance of seeing his family again disappeared very little.

“I can’t handle the torture faced by my parents and other people caught,” Amin, 24, told the BBC in Delhi.

Three months after the BBC evacuated from India’s capital, it managed to contact refugees in Myanmar. Most people are with Ba Htoo Army (BHA), a resistance group that resists the army in the southwestern part of the country.

“We don’t feel safe in Myanmar. This place is a complete war zone,” Soybean Noor said during a video call made by members of the BHA. He spoke from a wooden shelter, surrounded by six other refugees.

The BBC collected testimony from relatives in Delhi and talked with experts investigating the allegations to piece together what happened to them.

We learned that they were an island flying from Delhi to the Bay of Bengal, sitting on a naval ship, and eventually forced into the Andaman Sea in a life jacket. Then they head to the shore and now face an uncertain future Myanmar, mainly Myanmar where the Muslim Rohingya community escaped In recent years, a large number of evasions have been evaded.

“They tied our hands and covered our faces, and took us to the sea like a captive (on boarding the boat).

“How can someone throw people into the sea?” Mr. Amin asked. “There are humans living in the world, but I don’t see any humans in the Indian government.”

Thomas Andrews, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in Myanmar, said there was “significant evidence” to prove the allegations, which he had filed against India’s missionary chief in Geneva, but had not yet been responded to.

The BBC also contacted the Indian Foreign Ministry several times, but did not hear it during publication time.

The campaigners often show that the situation of the Rohingya in India is unstable. India does not recognize the Rohingya as refugees, but as illegal immigrants in the country’s foreigners’ bill.

India has a large number of Rohingya refugees, and although Bangladesh has a population of more than one million, it has the largest number. Most fled Myanmar after the deadly military crackdown in 2017. Despite living there for generations, the Rohingya are not considered citizens in Myanmar.

There are 23,800 Rohingya refugees registered in India with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNDCR). But Human Rights Watch estimates that the actual number is more than 40,000.

On May 6, 40 Rohingya refugees possessed UNHCR refugee cards and lived in different areas of Delhi, and were taken to the local police station under the guise of collecting biometric data. This is the annual process set by the Indian government, in which Rohingya refugees are photographed and fingerprinted. They told the BBC that a few hours later, they were taken to the city’s Inderlok Detention Centre.

Mr Amin said his brother called him at the time and told him that he was taken to Myanmar and asked him to find a lawyer and reminded UNHCR.

On May 7, refugees said they were taken to Hinton Airport east of Delhi, where they boarded a plane to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Gulf of Bengal.

“After getting off the plane, we saw two buses coming to receive us,” Noel said in a video call. He added that he could see the word “Bhartiya Nausena” written on the side of the bus, a Hindi term for the Indian Navy.

“Once we were on the bus, they tied our hands with some plastic material and covered our faces with black muslin,” he said.

Although the people on the bus did not identify themselves, they were dressed in military fatigue and were speaking Hindi.

After a short bus ride, the group boarded a naval ship in the Bay of Bengal, and Mr. Noel said they were just aware of it after Once their hands are unbuttoned, their faces are found.

They described the ship as a large warship with two floors, at least 150m (490 feet) in length.

“Many of the ship (people on board) were wearing T-shirts, black pants and black military boots,” said Mohammad Sajjad, who was on the phone with Mr Noor. “Not all of them were wearing the same thing – some were black, some were brown.”

Mr Noel said the team stayed on the naval ship for 14 hours. They regularly serve them meals, traditional Indian rice, lentils and cheese (cheese).

Some say they suffered violence and humiliation on board.

“We treated it very badly,” Mr. Noel said. “Some people were beaten so badly. They were photographed multiple times.”

During the video call, Foyaz Ullah showed a scar on his right wrist and was repeatedly punched in his back and face, poking it with a bamboo pole.

“They asked me why I’m illegal in India and why are you here?”

The Rohingya are a predominantly Muslim community, but 15 of the 40 people who forced their return in May were Christians.

Those who are detaining them from traveling from Delhi will even say, “’Why don’t you become a Hindus? Why do you change from Islam to Christianity?’. “They even asked us to pull our pants down and see if we were circumcised.”

Another refugee, Eman Hussain, said Accuse him of being involved pahalgam massacreIt refers to the April 22 attack, in which 26 civilians (mainly Hindu tourists) were shot and killed by Indian-managed Kashmir militants.

Islamabad denies that the Indian government has repeatedly accused Pakistani nationals of attacks. There was no suggestion that Rohingya had any connection with the shooting.

The next day, on May 8, around 12:30 GMT, refugees were told to climb the ladder on the side of the Shanghai military ship. Below, they describe four smaller rescue ships, made of black and rubber.

Refugees were boarded two ships, each with 20 ships, accompanied by several people transporting them. There were more than a dozen people on the other two ships leading the way. For more than seven hours, they traveled with their hands tied.

“A ship with military personnel arrived at the beach and tied a long rope to a tree. Then took that rope to the boat,” Noel said.

He said they got life jackets and their hands were not tied – they were told to jump into the water. “We stick to the rope and swim more than 100m on the shore,” he said, adding that they were told they had arrived in Indonesia.

Then the people who brought them there left.

The BBC submitted the allegations to the Indian government and the Indian Navy, and has not received a response.

In the early morning of May 9, local fishermen told them they were in Myanmar. They asked refugees to call their relatives in India on their cell phones.

For more than three months, the BHA has been assisting stranded refugees by providing food and shelter in the Tenateri region of Myanmar. But their families in India are terrified of the fate of Myanmar.

The lives of Rohingya refugees are “at great risk when Indian authorities force them into the Andaman Sea”, the United Nations said.

“I’ve been working on this very disturbing case,” Mr Andrews said, admitting that the amount of information he could share was limited, but he also “talked with witnesses and was able to confirm the reports and determine that they were actually based on”.

On May 17, Mr. Amin and another member of the dismissed refugee family filed a petition urging the Supreme Court of India to bring them back to Delhi, immediately stop similar deportations and provide compensation to all 40 people.

“This opens up the country for the horrible deportation of the Rohingya,” said Colin Gonsalves, a senior advocate for the Supreme Court.

“People can put a person in the sea in the war zone in a life jacket, which is what people automatically choose not to believe,” Mr. Gonsalves said.

In response to the petition, a Supreme Court judge on two benches called the charges “a fantasy idea.” He also said the prosecution did not provide enough evidence to confirm its claims.

Since then, the court has agreed to examine the theory point on September 29 to decide whether Rohingya can be regarded as a refugee, or whether they are illegal immigrants and are therefore deported.

Given that thousands of Rohingya refugees live in India, it is not clear why so much effort has been put into expelling these 40 people.

“No one in India can understand why they do this except against the venom of Muslims,” ​​Mr Gonsalves said.

Treatment of refugees has made the entire Rohingya community in India feel cold. Over the past year, its members claimed that deportation from Indian authorities increased. There is no official data to confirm this.

Some people are hiding. Others like Mr. Amin no longer sleep at home. He sent his wife and three children.

Amin said: “In my heart, only this kind of worry will be the Indian government that will bring us to the sea at any time. Now, we are even afraid to leave our home.”

“These people are not in India because they want to be,” said Mr Andrews of the United Nations.

“They were there because of the horrible violence in Myanmar. They were literally running for their lives.”

Other reports by Charlotte Scarr in Delhi