Rabha, ULFA militants’ involvement suspected
From Our Correspondent
TURA: Suspected militants belonging to the Rabha Viper Army and the ULFA abducted a senior official of State Bank of India from Mendipather in East Garo Hills on Thursday night.
The Assistant General Manager (inspection)of SBI — V K Gupta, posted in Guwahati, was abducted while he was returning from Mendipathar.
Five young men in two motorcycles stopped a Tata nano and a Maruti car ferrying the Assistant General Manager of SBI who was returning from an audit inspection of Mendipather branch of SBI at around 7:40pm.
The men, who were armed with small hand guns, halted the two cars at a place called Chotomia and pulled out Gupta from the Tata Nano (AS-01 AU 5192) and took him away.
Before leaving the place, they slapped the branch manager of Kharkutta SBI who was accompanying the AGM and warned him against informing the police.
By the time police got wind of the story the kidnappers had already crossed into Assam’s sprawling Krishnai area.
Police from East Garo Hills launched a search operation in the border areas while their counterparts from Krishnai police station searched the Assam side but were unsuccessful in obtaining any lead.
“The men who took away the bank official have been identified as Rabha militants and it is probably the handiwork of the ULFA backed by the Rabha Viper Army,” police sources said.
The involvement of Garo National Liberation Army (GNLA) militants have been ruled out since the kidnappers were non-Garos and spoke broken Hindi.
Meanwhile, sources from the SBI have denied receiving any ransom demand from the kidnappers.
The entire border belt between East Garo Hills district’s Mendipather zone and Assam’s Krishnai region of Goalpara district has become a major crime centre for the last few years. The area being vast and isolated police have a difficult time patrolling the area and militants and anti social elements make use of the porous border to cross over after committing a crime.
