Hyderabad: All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen president Asaduddin Owaisi has urged the Indian embassy in Russia to repatriate a man from Hyderabad who was forced to join the war with Ukraine.
In a letter to the Indian embassy in Moscow, the Hyderabad MP said, “Mohammed Ahmed, a resident of Hyderabad and an Indian Passport holder, went to Russia for a job. Upon reaching, Ahmed was forcibly taken to a remote area by the Russian Army. He received weapon training and was sent to the border. I request you to consider the matter and issue orders for the repatriation.”
In response, the counsellor of the Indian embassy in Moscow, Tadu Mamu, said, “The embassy has shared details of Mr Ahmed with the Russian authorities and sought his release from the Russian Army and safe repatriation to India.”
Ahmed forcibly recruited into Russian Army
In a video that has gone viral on social media, Ahmed alleged he was forcibly recruited into the Russian Army after being promised a construction job by a Mumbai-based consultancy.
A resident of Khairatabad, Ahmed was in desperate need of a job when he was approached by Adil, who introduced himself as the owner of Trust Consultancy and offered him a construction job in Russia.
With hopes of a ‘lucrative’ job opportunity abroad, Ahmed believed Adil and departed India on April 25 for Russia. His dreams soon crashed after he found himself unemployed for 25 days.
“I kept calling Adil and asked him to give me a job. But he made some excuse or another,” Ahmed said in a released selfie video on Thursday, October 16.
Unable to return and desperate, Ahmed started looking for jobs in the country. “I went to several places but got cheated. I lost all my money. And then I found myself in this situation,” he says.
According to Ahmed, 30 others like him were taken to an unknown area and given weapons training. After that, they were sent to the Ukrainian border to fight. He says that he tried to jump from the military vehicle but sustained a fracture in his left leg.
He also claimed that there were a total of 25 soldiers with him at the border base, fighting in the war, and 17 of them were killed.
“We were six Indians. Today, we got the news that one of us has been killed. We refused to fight. They (Russian army officials) put a gun to my head and threatened us. ‘We will kill you here, we will say that you got hit by a drone or a bomb was dropped, you will be buried anywhere,’” Ahmed is heard in the video.
Follow on Twitter | Posted by Mohammed Baleegh | 
