Kokrajhar attack: NDFB(S), ISI jointly planned carnage, says ex-Assam top cop

Guwahati: The NDFB(S) group that is suspected to have carried out the deadly attack in Assam’s Kokrajhar district on Friday has strong links with ISI, says former DGP Assam Ghanashyam Murari Srivastava. While speaking to Firstpost, he said that the militant group was mentored by the Pakistani intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence to carry out terror strikes in Assam in a secret meeting that took place two months back at a clandestine location at Chittagong in Bangladesh. He said that as per the mentorship of the patron, the group planned to launch attack in Assam. [caption id=“attachment_2937646” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  14 civilians were killed in the Kokrajhar attack. Photo: Twitter/ANI_News[/caption] Tipped off by sources, the police had ambushed a group of NDFB(S) militants on 16 July this year and killed three of them in Kokrajhar district. “If we go back to the records of militant attacks in Assam in the last 20 years we will find that they attack innocent people only when they are weak or they feel that local people have tipped off security forces about their existence. Today’s attack seems to have been factored by similar condition,” he said. He said that such an attack was not difficult to anticipate, given the fact that the joint operation of the police and army neutralised three militants only last month. The former Assam police chief further said that the militant group normally carry out these attacks to spread fear among the common people to prevent them from cooperating with the security forces. One such incident was the brutal murder of a young girl in August 2014. A bright Class-X student Priya Basumatary from Runikhata Girls’ High School in Laimati–Dwimuguri village in Chirang district was brutally killed in front of her family and other villagers by the NDFB(S), which suspected her of being a police informer. “When security forces fail to garner support from people it becomes easier for the militants to find money and shelter,” the former police chief said. In May 2014, heavily armed NDFB (S) militants had shot dead 11 people, including three children, and leaving three others seriously injured. Out of the 11, seven were shot dead in Kokrajhar. A group of 20 to 25 NDFB-Songbijit militants, armed with AK-47 rifles, swooped down on three houses at Balapara-I village in Kokrajhar district in the early hours on the today and fired indiscriminately killing seven people on the spot, the police had said. In December 2014 , NDFB (S) had gunned down 78 people in BTAD areas including Kokrajhar. According to the security expert, the Kokrajhar attack on Friday are unlikely to be carried out directly by Jihadi groups, but the NDFB group has strong links with ISI.