Prisoners to be returned after 35 years

India is preparing to return two Chinese prisoners of war who have been in a mental hospital in eastern Bihar state for nearly 35 years and have forgotten not only their language but also their identities.

Indian officials have asked the Chinese embassy in New Delhi to take charge of Mr M. A. Siblong and Mr Yung Chialung, languishing since the mid-1960s in the Central Institute of Psychiatry in Ranchi, Bihar, nearly 800 miles east of New Delhi. Both were arrested on charges of espionage around the time of the Sino-Indian war in 1962 and sent to Ranchi, reportedly to be treated for schizophrenia.

Hospital staff said there had been no correspondence about the two Chinese inmates from either the government or the army. The federal home ministry also said it had no knowledge of them.

But recent media reports about the plight of the two asylum inmates, who are old, frail and communicate with hospital staff through sign language, have led to ministry officials asking the Chinese embassy to take custody of them, as they were free to leave.

"We are trying to check their identities, whether they are really Chinese or not," Mr Lu Bing, the Chinese embassy press attache in New Delhi, said. He said newspaper reports of the two Chinese in the asylum had come as a "surprise ", as Beijing knew nothing about them.

Thousands of Chinese fled to India after the communist takeover in 1949 and settled in small communities across the country, especially in the eastern city of Calcutta. Hundreds were rounded up during the 1962 war with China, arising from a border dispute which remains unresolved, and placed in prisoner of war camps in northern India. They were released soon after.

Reports from Ranchi said Mr Siblong was described in hospital records as an "ex-People's Liberation Army soldier " at the time of his arrest near the Chinese border at the end of the war in which India came off worse. After a few years in a Delhi jail he was sent to the mental hospital at Ranchi and forgotten.

His compatriot Mr Chialung, recorded as a civilian in hospital records, walks with the help of a stick. He was arrested in the north-eastern border region around the same time and lodged in Patiala jail, 140 miles north of Delhi, for a couple of years before being sent for mental treatment.