Four more persons were killed by militants in the Karbi Anglong district of Assam on Sunday.
The police chief of the Bokajan sub-division in Karbi Anglong, S K Gogoi, said a gang of militants raided the remote Dehori and Rongbong Hat villages and kidnapped four persons including a woman and child at gunpoint in the early hours of Sunday.
“The hostages were later taken to a nearby jungle and shot dead”, he added.
The fresh killings have taken the death toll in the militant attacks over the past seven days to 30. Twenty-six of the dead belonged to the Hindi-speaking community. The state government on Sunday ordered evacuation of Hindi-speaking people from the remote villages to ‘safe shelters’ fortified by police and paramilitary personnel.
The Deputy Inspector General of Police L R Bishnoi stated that guerrillas of the proscribed ULFA and a local tribal militia, Karbi Longpi North Cacher National Liberation Front (KLNLF), jointly carried out the attack.
The two outfits had earlier killed 22 Hindi-speaking people, in three attacks in the same district. Officials said the militants could carry on attacks as it was almost impossible to bring under security the entire population of Hindi-speaking migrants and settlers.
They live in small and remote hamlets spread across the district. The ULFA stepped up its offensive since August 5 last, ostensibly to terrorize people in order to make sure that people refrained from participating in the Independence Day celebrations.
Like the previous years, the outfit – along with some other rebel organizations of the region – has called for a general strike on August 15 next and asked people to boycott the celebrations.
The ULFA has never been very active in Karbi Anglong. Here, mutually warring tribal militias often fight against each other and trigger fierce ethnic clashes.
But the outfit chose the hill district as the scene of its pre I-Day mayhem, apparently because the state government deployed a large number of security personnel in its usual haunts – Tinsukia, Dibrugarh and neighbouring districts in eastern Assam.
The Additional Director General of Police D K Pathak added that security had been beefed up across the state to pre-empt more strikes by the outfit ahead of I-Day.
The state’s major city, Guwahati, looked like a fortress on Sunday, with police and para-military personnel frisking people at almost all road crossings.
The ULFA has since 1979 been pursuing an armed rebellion to ‘liberate’ Assam from what it terms ‘colonial rule’ by New Delhi.
The outfit says that it targets the Hindi-speaking migrants from Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and other northern states, as they pose a threat to the indigenous people of Assam. The outfit’s members have killed nearly 100 Hindi-speaking people since last January.
