Agencies
GUWAHATI, JANUARY 19
[dropcap]A [/dropcap]day after they shot dead five Hindi-speaking bus passengers in Kokrajhar district, National Democratic Front of Bodoland (Songbijit) rebels attacked Muslim villagers, killing one of them and injuring four others in the Panbari area of neigbouring Chirang district on Saturday evening.Around the same time, a group of assailants killed Bishom Sharma, a Hindi-speaking barber, near his salon at Harisinga in Udalguri district. Police suspect the killers could be from the same militant outfit. Kokrajhar, Chirang and Udalguri districts are Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts.
Police identified the villager killed in Chirang as Imran Ali. “Friday’s killings were carried out by NDFB (Songbijit). But we cannot immediately say who killed the barber in Udalguri,” additional director general (law and order) AP Rout told TOI. He added that security forces have been deployed along National Highway 31 after Friday’s killing of five travellers from Bihar’s Siwan and Chapra districts. The victims were going to Banderdewa in Arunachal Pradesh from Siliguri in search of work at construction sites. Three other people from Bihar, who were on the same bus, were also injured in the attack.
Police said heavily armed militants waylaid two buses at Athiary, which is close to the Assam-West Bengal border, about 20 km east of Kokrajhar town. They allowed the vehicles to leave as they did not find any Hindi-speaking people travelling in them. They later stopped another bus carrying nine Hindi-speaking passengers. The dead were identified as Papu Kumar Singh, Avadh Behari Giri and his brother, Raj Behari (all from Chapra) and Samsad Mantri (Siwan). The fifth person is yet to be identified. Anmol Gupta, Ramanand Ojha and Babun Karmakar (all from Chapra) were among the injured. They are undergoing treatment in a private hospital in Bongaigaon. Two others are still missing.
Papu Kumar Singh’s younger brother Akhilesh Kumar, who escaped the massacre, said, “We were coming from Siliguri when our bus was stopped by an armed group on the highway. They asked us to get off the bus and told the driver to proceed. They then made us stand in a line and after sometime asked us to run. They fired from behind as we started running. I don’t know how many people were killed. I ran into a jungle and spent the night there.”
Bikash Rai, another survivor from Bihar, was rescued by police on Saturday evening at Gossaigaon railway station, about five km from the site of the attack.
