DOOARS TERAI: BSF hints at Jiban arrest in Bangladesh
Posted by barunroy on July 10, 2009
FROM THE TELEGRAPH
July 9: Senior BSF officers today said they have “heard” that KLO leader Jiban Singh has been arrested in Bangladesh, but refused to confirm it.
Singh, the most-wanted man and the self-styled commander of the outfit, had been picked up by the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) and the country’s police intelligence from a hotel in Rajsahi district this morning, they said.
News of the arrests of top Ulfa militants like Paresh Barua and Arabinda Rajkhowa had originated from Bangladesh several times but later they proved to be untrue.
Sources in the BSF’s intelligence branch in north Bengal said Singh had checked in as Mohammad Ismail in the hotel in Rajshahi’s Samtahar.
The deputy inspector-general of the BSF’s Malda range, Prabhat Singh Tomar, said he could not be sure about the development. “I heard from somewhere that Jiban Singh has been arrested in Bangladesh, but there is no confirmation,” he said.
“We have heard about the arrest, but no senior BDR officer is willing to go on record,” said a reporter of a Bangladeshi daily over the phone from Dhaka.
The Malda superintendent of police, Satyajit Banerjee, denied having received any news of the arrest. “It is a matter of Dhaka informing Delhi as per protocol… not for me to know,” Banerjee said.
After Operation Flushout was conducted by the Royal Bhutan Army in December 2003 to destroy KLO and Ulfa training camps in the Himalayan Kingdom, Singh and other leaders and militants of the two outfits escaped to Bangladesh through India.
The Bangladesh link continued. On April 19, a man claiming to be the KLO chairman rang up a television journalist in Cooch Behar town to say those attending the chief minister’s rallies would be at risk, a few hours before Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee addressed two meetings in the district.
Cooch Behar police superintendent confirmed that the caller identification on journalist’s mobile phone had the country code “088”, which meant that the call had originated from Bangladesh.
On July 2, the director-general of the BDR, Mainul Islam, was at Mahadipur in Malda where he spoke about Sheikh Hasina’s promise to flush out Indian militants from her country.
