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Assam : Another official kidnapped, dies of “heart failure”

	July 23, 2007

After being accused of getting P.C. Ram killed, the Congress-led Tarun Gogoi government in Assam faced the onslaught of another abduction and subsequent killing of mining engineer K. N. Jha.



Jha, a senior mining manager at the Cement Corporation of India’s Bokajan plant, died of cardiac arrest while walking through rough terrain along with 10 other hostages in Karbi Anglong district on July 15 night.



Between 15 and 20 militants of the Karbi Longri North Cachar Liberation Front reached the CCI colony at Dilai, two kilometre from Bokajan town, around 7.45 pm on Sunday and started searching the quarters for people to take hostage. Jha and mining foreman Janardhan Bhagat were among 11 people rounded up and forced to walk.



The militants stopped a truck on the way and herded all of them into the vehicle. They had travelled barely another two kilometre towards Dillai Parbat when the truck fell into a roadside pond. The militants abandoned the vehicle and resumed the foot march, taking with them the driver and the handyman. Jha collapsed after begging the militants to shoot him.



Barring the driver and the handyman, the rest of the hostages were freed a little later. Muksang Ranghang, the handyman, also returned to Bokajan. The driver, Rupsing Teron, is still missing, the officer-in-charge of Bokajan police station, Biswajit Purakayastha, said.



Jha’s son Sekhar and wife Asha took his body to their hometown, Darbhanga in Bihar, even as a 10-member delegation from the All Assam Students’ Union reached Bokajan to commiserate with CCI employees.





CCI staff lash Gogoi government



Angry CCI staff said it was a shame that the government did not even bother to depute a minister or a senior bureaucrat to visit Bokajan after such a shocking incident. The employees said they would rather approach Delhi than Dispur for better security arrangements.





Prime Minister Manmohan Singh condoled Jha’s death in a statement from New Delhi.



The CCI staff union said it would petition Union Home Minister Shivraj Patil and Minister for Heavy Industries and Public Enterprises Sontosh Mohan Dev to deploy either Central Industrial Security Force or Border Security Force personnel at CCI installations.



The union said Dispur ignored several such petitions for additional security. “We apprised the state government of our security concerns time and again, but it did not react. A few armed homeguards and periodic patrolling by the police are not enough. We want well-equipped forces to be permanently deployed,” the general secretary of the union, Robin Hatiborua, said.





Army cracks Tinsukia terror plot



Tinsukia was spared another tryst with terror when the Army on July 19 arrested two ULFA couriers with a deadly cocktail of explosives meant to bomb marketplaces in the town on July 27.



Two bombs, each packed with a kg of RDX, were seized from the duo along with detonators, two Maruti cars and an unspecified amount of counterfeit currency.



Lt Col Gurvinder Singh, the officiating commanding officer of the 2 Bihar Regiment, said Kamal Chiring and Durgeswar Moran were supposed to hand the explosives to ULFA militants hiding in the town. “We had specific inputs on ULFA’s plan to trigger blasts in busy areas of Tinsukia town on July 27. We managed to arrest the duo around 1.30pm and we hope to extract more information from them as we go along.”



The duo told interrogators that ULFA intended to plant bombs at TDA Plaza and Hotel Centre Point, both located in busy areas of Tinsukia. Had they succeeded, the casualties would have been higher than in the last ULFA strike in the commercial hub of Upper Assam.



Four persons died and over 50 were wounded in simultaneous explosions in the fish and fruit markets of the town on July 1.