TANZANIAN government officials have rejected claims by a New York-based human rights group that the east African country is ill-treating refugees, newspapers reported on Thursday. The privately-owned Guardian quoted Home Affairs Minister Ali Ameir Mohammed as saying that he was aware of the Human Rights Watch report, but said the government had simply rounded up some immigrants with criminal records. “Tanzania will never tolerate the so-called refugees with criminal records,” he said. “Tanzania has done nothing wrong by conducting operations against illegal immigrants in the border regions of Kigoma and Kagera” in the western part of the country. The Human Rights Watch report, released Wednesday, said that tens of thousands of refugees, some of whom have lived in Tanzania for more than two decades, had been rounded up by the Tanzanian army and confined to camps in the west of the country for the past year.