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Assam militancy claim 11 |
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In neighbouring Assam, the gun-toting militants, suspected to be from the Jewel Gorlosa faction of the Dima Halam Daogah (DHD), killed 10 civilians, mostly truckers, at Krumgminglangsu, in North Cachar Hills, on Thursday, May 15.
According to an eyewitness, a driver of one of the ill-fated trucks, the convoy had nine trucks. The five were stopped after two trucks ahead had passed. The militants then climbed in all the five and took them to the site of the incident. The drivers of the two other trucks, which were trailing a little distance behind, fled after sensing trouble ahead. They were later rescued by the security forces from their hiding place in the nearby woods.
According to one of the villagers in front of whose hut the militants had parked the five trucks, the drivers and the others were brought out of their trucks, lined up and shot. “Two of them started running towards our house but they were caught and shot again from close range,” said another.
“It all happened so quickly. We heard people screaming. I watched the grisly scene from a crack on the door,” said the villager. “First we thought they were security forces going by their uniforms, but realised only after that they were not.”
“The two who tried to flee had come up to the fence of our house and clutched it violently and was almost bringing it down before they were caught and shot.”
A similar horrifying tale was unfolding in another part of the district. As the train emerged out of a tunnel near Mupa station, militants perched on a hilltop sprayed bullets on it. Driver Bora stopped the train immediately and reversed it inside the tunnel. But the militants climbed down and sprayed bullets on the driver and his three colleagues from point blank range.
“It was the driver’s prompt action in reversing the train back to the safety of the tunnel that saved the lives of several railway employees,” an NFR spokesman said.
In a violent reaction to the attack on the railway em¬ployees, about 400 railwaymen and their families went on the rampage at Lumding station on May 16. They damaged the station office, the control office, the divisional railway manager’s office, the officers’ rest house and 10 railway vehicles.
Gorlosa calls for unilateral ceasefire
Militant leader Jewel Gorlosa has reportedly called for a unilateral ceasefire after the gruesome killing of innocent civilians. However, police said they were “verifying the authen¬ticity” of the news.
Speaking to newspersons, Inspector General of Police (Spe¬cial Branch), Khagen Sarmah, said, “I have heard that they have declared a ceasefire. We are looking into it,” he said. The police would watch the outfit’s “behaviour” in the coming days to ascertain the veracity of the report, he added.
However, a section of the police top brass described the news of “Jewel Gorlosa truce” as “too good to be true” apparently going by its past record.
Police sources described the attacks as “retaliatory”, adding, “the outfit had already declared a unilateral ceasefire but was forced to display its firepower after the killing of its cadres. It was a forced interim act and after its mission was accomplished, the outfit might now have decided to return to its unilateral ceasefire declared on March 25,” a source said.
The outfit had called a unilateral ceasefire on March 25 but called it off after 12 of their own men were allegedly killed by the army. The army owned up to the encounter but failed to locate a single body.
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