Chetia plotted his crimes in Dhaka

GUWAHATI, Jan 11: On June 28, 1990, several top tea planters of the country drove down a meandering and slippery road from Dibrugarh. The ro...

GUWAHATI, Jan 11: On June 28, 1990, several top tea planters of the country drove down a meandering and slippery road from Dibrugarh. The road became muddier as it passed tea gardens, one by one. It had been raining for the past five days in upper Assam.

The convoy stopped at the Bogupara tea estate manager’s bungalow. Gun-toting young men ushered the planters to the living room and waiting there was a man in his mid-30s, the general secretary of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA). Anup Chetia.

What necessitated the risky journey to buy peace was a murder which Chetia masterminded. Three months before the planters’ meeting with Chetia, tea tycoon Surrendra Paul, chairman and managing director of the Apeejay group, had been shot. The murder of the younger brother of London-based millionaire Swraj Paul on April 7, 1990, sent shock waves across the industry and transported Chetia to planters’ nightmares.

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The man who India wants extradited from Bangladesh has masterminded all major abductions and murders that the ULFA has committed in the past 19 years. Based in Dhaka for the last six years, Chetia identified targets and remote-controlled the ULFA’s crime business. He began life as Golap Barua in Jerai Chakali-Bhoriya village, 24 km from Dibrugarh. (Commander-in-Chief of ULFA Paresh Barua also comes from here.) Golap, before he became Chetia and the ULFA general secretary, was a referee at Dibrugarh’s C’ division football matches. Then a small-time sports organiser, he was the manager of the Assam team to the National Rural Sports Meet in Jammu, 1979.

That year, ULFA was launched and soon Chetia graduated from organising football matches to crimes. “He is responsible for all the acts of the ULFA, after all, he is the general secretary, and he decides whom to abduct, whom to ask money and whom to eliminate,” says a senior Assam police officer.

The police has at least six specific cases against Chetia.

The Surrendra Paul murder case registered at the Chabua police station on April 7, 1990, names Chetia as one of the prime accused.“It was Chetia along with Paresh Barua who took the decision to kill the planter,” says the officer.

He is also wanted in the robbery of UCO Bank in the heart of Guwahati in April 1985. The case was registered at the Chandmari police station. The manager of the bank, Girish Goswami, brother-in-law of Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta, was shot.

There is a case against him registered in the Sonari police station in Sibsagar district for another bank robbery.

A case at Baihata police station, Kamrup district, names him for organising unlawful assembly and conspiring to wage an war against the Government of India.

Chetia is also wanted in the Sanjoy Ghose case. “We have definite information that it was Chetia who identified Ghose as a target to whip up international media coverage, and it was so well-timed that the entire world fixed its eyes on Assam while Chetia himself went to attend a UN human rights sub-commission convention in Geneva in July,” says the police officer.

The files that the Intelligence departments maintain on the ULFA describe Chetia as a perfect international campaigner, given the background that he not only gave shape to the outfit but also held important portfolios in the organisation such as secretary finance, home and training. This is the fifth time that Chetia has been arrested since he passed out of college, but only the third as an ULFA activist. He was arrested in March 1987 when the police raided a weaving complex near Guwahati, detained under TADA and released after 13 months. He came out of jail and got married. Again he was held in December, 1991, from a guest house in Calcutta.