PFI’s West Bengal president arrested by Assam police from Delhi

Guwahati, Sep. 23 (PTI): The West Bengal president of Popular Front of India has been arrested by Assam Police from Delhi and brought here for production before the court, police said here on Friday.

The PFI leader, Minarul Sheikh was arrested from the national capital at 12:30 a.m in the intervening night of Thursday and Friday and brought to Guwahati.

He has been booked in a Special Operations Unit (SOU) case under various sections of the IPC relating to sedition, criminal conspiracy, promoting enmity and assault to deter public servant from discharge of duty.

Another PFI activist Bazrul Karim was arrested from Karimganj in Assam on Thursday and brought here late in the night.

Karim is the general secretary of PFI’s Barak valley district committee and a state executive committee member.

With Sheikh’s arrest 11 PFI members have been arrested by Assam police.

Nine of them were remanded to police custody for five days on Thursday, which saw a massive crackdown on the radical Islamic outfit by the National Investigation Agency in 15 states simultaneously for allegedly supporting terror activities in the country.

Among the ten PFI members arrested from Assam, four are from Nagarbera in Kamrup (Rural) district, two from Guwahati and one each from Karimganj, Barpeta, Baksa and Nagaon districts. They were brought to Guwahati and interrogated separately at the special branch headquarters, the police said.

According to a statement of the Assam Police in Guwahati on Thursday, leaders of the organisation were arrested as there is reliable information’ that they were making efforts to foment communal strife in the north east state.

They were indulging in whipping up communal passion and sentiment of the religious minority by criticising every policy of the government with communal overtones with a view to terming these actions as attacks on the Muslim community, the statement read.

The activists had been extensively using the cyberspace to incite people by taking up issues and orders of courts outside the state, the statement claimed.

The activists were also allegedly involved in organising protests against the issues in communally sensitive areas of Assam’s Karimganj, Barpeta, Baksa, Kamrup (Rural), Goalpara and Kamrup (Metro) districts, according to the statement.