Jorhat SP Deepak Choudhury with the cash recovered from the slain Ulfa militants in Majuli on Thursday. A Telegraph picture

Guwahati, Feb. 26: Police today gunned down a top leader of Ulfa’s 28 battalion along with another cadre at Baligaon under Jengrai police station on the river island of Majuli.

Bhaskar Hazarika, second-in-command of the outfit’s 28 battalion, was killed in a gunbattle with the police in Majuli where the militant leader was taking shelter along with a nine-member group.

Another militant, identified as Sarat Bora, was also killed in the encounter this morning.

Based on specific information about a group of Ulfa cadres taking shelter in the house of Bhumidhar Khound at Baligaon, a police team raided the house at around 8am today.

The team, led by circle inspector Pranab Gogoi, was fired upon and in the ensuing gunbattle, the two militants died while the rest escaped.

Khound told the police that the group came to his house last night and demanded shelter at gunpoint.

Nine bags of incriminating documents of the outfit’s 28 battalion, an AK-47 rifle, 20 detonators and fuse wires, two pistols and several grenades were recovered from the incident site.

Besides, $10,000 and Rs 1 lakh in cash was also recovered from a bag.

Jorhat superintendent of police, Deepak Choudhury said the police first thought that the notes wrapped in polythene were explosives.

The documents include the amount of money collected by the battalion in the last few months, names of persons who have donated to the Ulfa coffers and extortion notices.

The police said Hazarika was the operational commander of Ulfa’s 28 battalion and had received arms training in Afghanistan along with the outfit’s central committee member, Antu Choudang, in 2002. Hazarika, who hails from Sivasagar, also trained Ulfa cadres in handling explosives. Choudang is said to be in Bangladesh.

The police said it was one of the biggest operations launched in Majuli in recent times, with officers in-charge of three police stations — Kamalabari, Garmurh and Jengrai — being part of the team, backed by commandos.

The police said another militant, suspected to be Rajib Das, the Ulfa commander of Majuli, might have been injured in the gunbattle. But he escaped. “Operations are on to nab the fleeing militants,” a police official at Kamalabari police station said.

Security forces have sealed Majuli’s border with Lakhimpur and intensified river patrolling on the Brahmaputra.

Prabal Neog, former commander of the 28 battalion and now a member of the pro-talks group, said Hazarika was one of the two second-in-commands of the battalion under him when he was the commander. The other was Bijoy Chinese.

“Bhaskar, a lieutenant-ranked cadre, was promoted to senior second-in-command under Bijoy Chinese after my arrest in Tezpur,” Neog said.

“Together with Antu, the duo are considered to be the best in business as far as Ulfa is concerned,” Neog said.

Chief minister Tarun Gogoi today said he had asked the ceasefire-bound group of the 28 battalion to bring the others who are still in the jungles to the negotiating table.

Leaders of the truce group had met the chief minister recently and demanded autonomy for the state. They also sought release of the four central committee leaders of Ulfa, 70 per cent reservation of Assembly seats for the indigenous people and creation of an Upper House comprising the indigenous and ethnic people.

Gogoi today said there were “practical problems” in acceding to such demands.