NGO worker imprisoned in Bangladesh returns home to France

A French NGO volunteer and Muslim convert who was imprisoned in Bangladesh for 70 days returned home to France on Sunday to a hero’s welcome.

Maxime Puemo Tchantchuing, better known by his adopted Muslim name Moussa Ibn Yacoub, returned to France after not only being imprisoned for 70 days but also being prevented from leaving Bangladesh for another four months. When he stepped off the plane at Charles de Gaulle international airport, Moussa was welcomed with cheers and applause from a crowd of about 100 people who had gathered to greet him, reports france24.com.

Moussa, 28, left for Bangladesh in December 2015 on a mission for BarakaCity, a French NGO whose mission statement calls it a humanitarian organisation that believes Islam “is a unifier of all cultures facing all difficulties”. His goal was to help the Rohingya people, a minority Muslim group that Amnesty International has called “the most persecuted people in the world”.

Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya have fled their native Burma after being subjected to decades of violence. But the Bangladesh government has not welcomed the Rohingya either, considering them illegal immigrants and restricting them to refugee camps.

While making his way to the Rohingya camps on December 22, Moussa was arrested for “suspicious activities” and imprisoned. According to AFP, the authorities were concerned by the discrepancy between the name on his passport and the Muslim name he uses: Tchantchuing took the name “Moussa” after he converted to Islam.

He was also reprimanded for not reporting to the authorities upon his arrival. But doing so would have made his mission impossible, a BarakaCity representative told Al Jazeera in January, since Bangladesh’s Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina “doesn’t want any humanitarian organisation to go anywhere near the Rohingya”

http://www.france24.com/en/20160808-french-volunteer-imprisoned-bangladesh-returns-home-ngo-muslim