Pravin Ram was stunned when the TV channels on Saturday aired the news that his father had been found dead near the India-Bhutan border in Assam.
For the 25-year-old student of a management institute in Ghaziabad near Delhi, it was really hard to believe. For, just a few hours back, he had received a call from a leader of the proscribed ULFA, which had kidnapped his father — the Executive Director of the Food Corporation of India (FCI), P C Ram.
They discussed about the ransom to be paid to the outfit for the release of Mr Ram, who was abducted from Guwahati on April 17 last. Such calls kept his hope alive for the last two and a half months and made him believe that his father would be back someday.
Greedy captors
But on Sunday, as he stood speechless in front of the decomposed corpse in the mortuary of a hospital in Nalbari in western Assam, Pravin had no doubt that it was all over. He perhaps also realised how unprincipled and greedy his father’s captors were.
He was in no mood to talk to the media-persons. But the Deputy Inspector General of Police G P Singh told the scribes that the ULFA had kept on seeking money from Mr Ram’s family even after he had been killed and buried at the remote Ananda Pathar village in Baksa.
“It seems Mr Ram was killed three or four days back. And the kidnappers called up his son to seek money even on Saturday morning,” said Mr Singh.
The post-mortem examination conducted at 2-30 p.m. on Saturday also indicated that Mr Ram was killed at least 45 hours before.
His throat was slit and there were injury-marks on his foot. He was also hit with a sharp-edged weapon on his stomach.
“The ULFA has stooped so low that they negotiated on the amount of ransom for a man they had already killed and buried,” said another police official.
Sanjay Ghose episode
But this is not the “new low” for the ULFA, which had once been seen by many in Brahmaputra Valley as a revolutionary organisation fighting to “liberate” Assam.
The abduction and brutal killing of Mr Ram reminded the senior police officers what the ULFA had done with the social activist, Sanjay Ghose, a decade ago.
Mr Ghose was kidnapped from Majuli — an island on Brahmaputra in eastern Assam – on July 4, 1997.