By late afternoon the colour of the water had lost some of its intensity, the AFP news agency reported.

Residents have claimed that many local companies dispose of toxic waste in the waterway, which runs through an area of leather processing and textile factories some 10km (6 miles) from the centre of the capital.

A resident, a woman called Silvia, told local news channel C5N that although it is has turned red now, “other times it was yellow, with an acidic smell that makes us sick even in the throat”. “I live a block from the stream. Today, it has no smell. There are not many factories in the area, although there are warehouses.”

Another resident, Maria Ducomls, told AFP industries in the region dump waste in the water, and said she had seen it coloured differently in the past – “bluish, a little green, pink, a little lilac, with grease on top”.

[BBC]

Deportation in the US is organised and executed by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

“We have been informed by ICE that women and children are not restrained,” Jaishankar said.

He added that according to ICE, the needs of deportees during transit, including for food and medical attention, were attended to and deportees could be unrestrained during bathroom breaks.

“There has been no change from past procedure,” he added.

However Jaspal Singh, one of the deportees on the flight that landed in Amritsar city in the state of Punjab on Wednesday, told BBC Punjabi that he was shackled throughout the flight.

“We were tortured in many ways. My hands and feet were tied after we were put on the plane. The plane stopped at several places,” he said, adding that he was unshackled only after the plane landed in Amritsar.

The US has not given further details of how deportees were treated on the flight. Officials have said that enforcing immigration laws is “critically important to the national security and public safety of the United States” and it was US policy to “faithfully execute the immigration laws against all inadmissible and removable aliens”.

The US border patrol chief posted video showing deportees in shackles, saying the deportation flight to India was the “farthest deportation flight yet using military transport”.

President Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of undocumented foreign nationals a key policy. The US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered illegally.

Trump has said India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi had assured him that the country would “do what’s right” in accepting US deportations.

In his statement on Thursday, Jaishankar said all countries had an obligation to take back their nationals who had entered other countries illegally. They often faced dangerous journeys and inhumane working conditions once they had reached their destinations, he said.

Fraudulent Indian travel agencies are known to take huge sums of money from people desperate to travel abroad for work, and then make them undertake dangerous journeys to avoid being caught by immigration officials.

Jaspal said he had taken a loan of 4m rupees ($46,000; £37,000] to travel to the US, a dangerous journey that took months and during which he saw bodies in the jungle of other migrants who had died on the route.

[BBC]