Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Guwahati, January 9: The Assam government, which is still struggling to control the situation created by the ULFA that had massacred over 100 Hindi-speaking people since Diwali, is now pulling up its sleeves to control the menace that is SULFA, "S" being a prefix standing for "surrendered."
The government appears to be fully convinced that a section of the surrendered militants did have a hand in the retaliatory attacks on family members of ULFA leaders in the recent past, and the police have already announced that all illegal arms in possession of the SULFA would be seized.
In Guwahati, there was a large-scale protest against the abduction and killing of Jyotish Sharma, an employee of the Gauhati University, who incidentally happened to be a brother-in-law of ULFA leader Subhash Sharma last week.
Though Assam Police additional director-gnral GMS Srivastava claimed that it were some pro-surrender ULFA militants who were responsible for Sharma’s killing, the general perception is that some SULFA members were behind the incident.
Meanwhile, the police recently asked a group of surrendered youths that was being provided shelter in a police battalion campus to vacate the premises. But that has led to public resentment after the group shifted to a rented house in the posh Ujanbazar locality of the city.
Residents from the locality even gheraoed local MLA and state municipal administration minister Biraj Kumar Sharma, demanding that the group should not be allowed to stay at Ujanbazar.
The police announcement regarding seizure of illegal arms in possession of SULFA members in the meantime has led to the recovery of two AK-47 rifles and 22 rounds of ammunition from a dustbin in the Rajgarh locality here yesterday. City SP GP Singh said those must have been possession of some former militants who threw them away after the police announcement.
Conflict in ULFA ranks: Assam Police additional DG Srivastava meanwhile has claimed that the abduction and murder of Jyotish Sharma, brother-in-law of ULFA leader Subhash Sharma was the result of a conflict between the pro-surrender and anti-surrender groups within the ULFA.
He said the police have arrested one Pratap Kalita, a self-styled sargent major of the ULFA recently, who confessed that it were two ULFA cadres Ramani Kalita and Sashi Phukan, who had hatched the conspiracy to kill Jyotish Sharma.Th two had come down from Bhutan to surrender, but when their families received threats from the ULFA leadership, they went ahead and abducted and killed Subhash Sharma’s brother-in-law as revenge, the Assam Police additional DG claimed.
