Amar (left) and Indra being taken to the Toofanganj court on Thursday. Picture by Main Uddin Chisti

Baxirhat (Cooch Behar), Jan. 28: Two KLO militants — Amar Singha alias Abhijit Singh and Indra Roy — were arrested from near the Bengal-Assam border last night.

District superintendent of police of Cooch Behar Kalyan Bandyopadhyay said the duo had recently entered India from Bangladesh via the Tura border in Meghalaya.

According to the district police chief, five SIM cards of India and Nepal, a cellphone and a letter written by Amar were seized from them. The letter was an appeal to the youths of north Bengal to join the KLO. “The militants had failed in their mission to create disturbances during Republic Day because of strict vigil by the police and other security agencies. Acting on a tip-off that the duo had entered Bhalka village (55km from Cooch Behar town) near the Sankosh bridge, plain-clothes men from Baxirhat police station laid a trap there. As they got down from a bus coming from Assam around 9.30pm, they were caught,” Bandyopadhyay said.

Today, the accused were produced before the subdivisional judicial magistrate of Toofanganj who remanded them in police custody for 14 days.

Amar is originally from Khayerbari in Darjeeling district, while Indra is a resident of Golokganj of Assam’s Dhubri, the police said. Amar was considered to be close to KLO chief Jiban Singha, now in Bangladesh, and had stayed with him in the same house for over two and half years.

He had left Bangladesh at the instance of Jiban three months ago to find a “safe haven” in Nepal after Bangladesh heightened its anti-terror drive on its soil. After visiting Nepal, Amar landed in India a few days ago.

During the interrogation, Amar reportedly told the police that Jiban had instructed him to recruit youths for the KLO’s Eighth Batch and carry out a fund-raising drive in north Bengal and Assam. He also confessed to have “motivated” some youths for this purpose and Indra was one of them.