Guwahati, Jan. 9: A recalcitrant Ulfa struck back with a vengeance this evening, exploding a powerful IED close to the Northeast Frontier Railway headquarters at Maligaon, which left a railway employee dead and eight others injured.
The blast came a day after police claimed a major success after gunning down the main accused in the New Year’s day serial blasts in Guwahati, hours after the arrest of five Ulfa collaborators in the city and barely minutes after a tough-talking government announced a “zero-tolerance” policy against militants and terrorists.
City police spokesperson Jayshree Khersa confirmed the death of railway employee Dhiren Kumar Kakoty, 41, but added that “the toll may go up”.
Railway CPRO S. Hajong said the victim was a railway traffic inspector (safety). He added that the injured included six railway employees, two of them women.
The condition of three of the injured was said to be critical. Altogether three women were among the injured in the explosion, which took place about 100 meters from the railway headquarters, at the Shuttle gate market near Bishnu Rabha Park around 6.30pm.
The area is close to Kamakhya Gate. The blast site, frequented mostly by railway employees, is around 17km from Dispur.
The IED, a timer device, was planted on a bicycle parked between two small cars — a Santro and a WagonR. Both the vehicles were damaged in the blast. The area — littered with shards of glass and splattered with blood — was teeming with evening shoppers when the bomb went off.
Inspector-general of police (central western range) G.P. Singh confirmed that it was Ulfa’s handiwork. “It is the same group which sneaked into the city few days before New Year to carry out strikes,” Singh said.
Harish Tiwari, a shopkeeper, said the deafening sound shook the entire area. “Had the two vehicles not taken the impact of the blast, there would have been more casualties,” he said.
Haldhar Talukdar, a railway employee, said every evening security personnel check that particular area. “But there were no securitymen today,” he said.
A police official at the blast site said the bomb was planted not more than 10 minutes before it went off, quoting one of the car owners, who said when he had parked his car, the bicycle was not there. “He (the militant) selected a place where he could hide the cycle between two vehicles so that it would not be noticed easily.”
The blast comes a day after Pranjal Deka, the main suspect of the January 1 serial blasts, was killed in an encounter at Rangia.
While one of the seriously injured, 26-year-old Azharuddin Ahmed, was admitted to the neurosurgery ICU at Gauhati Medical College Hospital, some were shifted to the nearby railway hospital and a private hospital. Another critically injured person, Rajiv Sharma, was shifted to GNRC Hospitals.
Ramen Talukdar, deputy superintendent of the GMCH, said the condition of Ahmed was “very serious”.
An irate crowd shouted anti-government slogans at the blast site in protest.
Minutes before the explosion, health minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, participating in the debate on the governor’s address in the Assembly, said there cannot be “ifs and buts” in the fight against terror. “Our Congress party does not care about Ulfa, NDFB, Huji or Fuji. We will tackle them firmly. There cannot be politics with terror. Our message to Paresh Barua and Ranjan Daimary should be that the Assembly discussed development, not blasts,” Sarma argued in favour of the governor’s address, which, the Opposition said, did not articulate the ground realities of the state.
A circumspect chief minister Tarun Gogoi left no one in doubt about the government’s tough stand saying militancy would be dealt with firmly, and talks will be held only with the leadership of the outfits and within the Constitution.
