India is holding prisoners from Bangladesh, Burma and Sri Lanka in the tsunami-hit Andamans who havealready served their sentences because no one is claiming them, an island official said.
The prisoners, mainly fishermen caught in Indian territorial waters, have spent the 12 days since tsunamis hit the archipelago in a primitive camp with little water to drink.
Andaman's Judicial Secretary Anand Kumar Raha Wednesday told AFP the confined foreigners were being kept in "safe custody." "It is a shelter for these men because they are foreigners and they may come in harm's way if they are allowed to roam free. It is safe custody in temporary shelterand we take a roll call everyday to ensure none are lost," he said.
The bare-backed men with matted hair squatted on the ground behind a barbed-wire fence looking desolatelyat a locked gate as soldiers with fixed bayonets guarded them under a blazing sun.
"They are kept inside a barbed wire enclosure? Really? I must check," Raha said, but admitted a group has filed a case in India's Supreme Court questioning the administration's right to hold people who have served their full sentence.
The prison-house lies secluded in lush hills outside Port Blair and currently holds 227 Burmese, one Sri Lankan and one Bangladeshi.
Five Indonesians who were pushed into Indian waters by the tsunamis were held in the facility for two days but released when their plight was highlighted by international media.
"They have finished their full term in the main prison but because they are foreigners they cannot leave unless their embassies take them away," prison guard Jagdish Srivastav said. "But now that the countries of their origin are themselves grappling with post-tsunami work we don't know when these poor sods can leave," said Srivastav, swinging a stout baton.
Inmates of the controversial jail had their own questions. "What about us?" asked Guruswamy, detained since 1997 when he boarded a cargo ship in Colombo as stowaway to escape Sri Lanka's ethnic war.
He says he was set adrift in mid-sea on a wooden plank and three days later washed ashore on Andaman's Campbell Bay island. Guruswamy, from Kilinochchi district, says he completed his sentence five years ago and wants to be set free.
"Am I to waste my youth here? Officials say I can leave only in a bodybag," said the 25-year-old, labelled by guards as a "spy" sent to India by Sri Lanka's rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
Mohammad Salim from Burma strayed into Indian waters with an illegal catch on January 14, 2004 and was sentenced to six months in prison by a Indian court in Andamans.
"Earlier our embassy used to send planes once a month to pick up some of us but now my country is battling to clean up the mess left behind by the tsunamis so we don't know what will happen to us," said 22-year-old Salim.
Compatriot Tanshi too strayed into Indian waters from nearby Burma and completed his sentence in July 2003.
"My wife has died and I don't know what happened to my four kids. Oh, I miss them so much," the 45-year-old man said.