Oct. 31: Both Ulfa and anti-talks Bodo militants have been on an abduction spree since last night, kidnapping an executive of a construction company and an official of the irrigation department from Arunachal Pradesh and lower Assam.

Security forces managed to rescue the irrigation department official four hours after he was abducted and foiled another plan by the anti-talks Ranjan Daimary-led NDFB to abduct a railway engineer, also in lower Assam, today.

Anchal Modi, 25, an executive of the construction firm Bharatiya Associates, was in his office at New Aceran, 60km from Pasighat, the headquarters of East Siang district in Arunachal Pradesh, last night when seven armed youths, suspected to be NDFB cadres, came calling and abducted him. East Siang is adjacent to the Upper Assam district of Dhemaji.

The militants also took away mobile phones of the other employees present in the office.

In Udalguri, Nur Rahman, the sub-divisional officer of the irrigation department’s Tangla division, was rescued from Ramhari village near Bhakatpara under Mangaldoi police station around 3pm, four hours after he was abducted from Ambagaon in the district. Bhakatpara is about 35km from Ambagaon.

Police said the abductors were Ulfa militants and had been identified. “Operations are on to apprehend the culprits,” a police official in Udalguri said.

Rahman was returning after inspecting the Rs 4-crore Kawadanga irrigation project when four motorcycle-borne youths waylaid his official jeep near Ambagaon, 5km away, around 11am and abducted him at gunpoint. The youths also took away the mobile phones of the jeep’s driver, Prafulla Talukdar, and junior engineer Lakhi Saikia, who was accompanying Rahman.

Acting on a tip-off, police rescued Rahman from a house in Ramhari. “The kidnappers fled when they saw security personnel conducing house-to-house search in the area,” the police official said.

Sources said Rahman had gone to Udalguri from his residence in Guwahati this morning in his Bolero. He took the official vehicle at Tangla, 100km from Guwahati.

Although the police declined to divulge whether there was a ransom demand, sources said the youths had demanded a huge sum of money from the SDO as “tax” for the two ongoing projects in the area. The other project is Bhalukmari, about 7km from Kawadanga. “The SDO declined to pay such a huge amount,” a source said.

Another plan to abduct a railway engineer by NDFB militants was foiled in Nalbari district around 11am. The police said there was concrete information about an attempt to kidnap R. Ram, the chief engineer (rack procurement), today. Ram was inspecting a project site on the railway tracks between Koithalkuchi and Nalbari when a team of Assam police rushed to the area and escorted him to safety.