The police in India’s north-eastern state of Assam produced two top leaders of the banned separatist outfit ULFA in a Guwahati court on Saturday. The chief judicial magistrate in Guwahati sent the duo to police custody for 10 days after they were produced in his court on Saturday. ULFA has alleged that its ‘finance secretary’ Chitrabon Hazarika and ‘foreign secretary’ Shashadhar Choudhury had been picked up by ‘unidentified armed men’ from a house in Dhaka, sometime between November 1 night and November 2 morning.

The outfit has called for a dawn-to-dusk general shutdown across the state of Assam on Monday (November 9) to protest against the detention of its leaders. In a statement e-mailed to the press, the ULFA chairman, Arabinda Rajkhowa, alleged that the detention of Hazarika and Choudhury from Dhaka was part of the Indian government’s ‘conspiracy’ to neutralise the organisation’s leaders. The organisation has also protested at their ‘handover to Indian authorities’ though Bangladesh has no extradition treaty with India.

Neither the Indian government in New Delhi nor the state government in Assam has made any official statement on how the two top rebel leaders landed in the custody of the Indian police. Sources in India’s home ministry, however, speaking to bdnews24.com in New Delhi, said Hazarika and Choudhury had been spotted by the Border Security Force personnel on the Bangladesh-India border at Gokul Nagar in Tripura. ‘They were trying to cross over to India from Bangladesh, when the BSF personnel spotted them and asked them to surrender. They surrendered and were taken into custody,’ an official of the Indian government’s ministry of home affairs said. He added that the two ULFA leaders had later been taken to Guwahati.

The Indian government and security agencies have long alleged that ULFA and other insurgent groups operating in the country’s north-eastern states have bases in Bangladesh. They claim that the ULFA chairman, ‘military chief’ Paresh Barua and other leaders remote-control the outfit’s subversive activities in Assam from Dhaka and other cities in Bangladesh. They have, however, acknowledged that Hasina’s government, coming to power in January this year, has come down heavily on ULFA leaders and their activities in Bangladesh, booking them in cases such as the 2004 Chittagong ‘ten truck arms’ haul. The Indian government’s ministry of external affairs has not yet made any formal statement on the detention of Hazarika and Choudhury.

-New Age