Arrested Ulfa vice-chairman Pradip Gogoi and cultural secretary Pranati Deka in court in Guwahati on Tuesday. Picture by Eastern Projections

Guwahati, Dec. 30: The designated court today granted bail to arrested Ulfa cultural secretary Pranati Deka against the TADA case (number 32/01).

Deka had earlier jumped bail in this case in 1998 and returned to the outfit’s headquarters in Bhutan along with her one-year- old son.

Deka, lodged in Guwahati Jail at present, will, however, not be released from prison immediately as two other TADA cases are pending against her.

Deka’s counsels — Bijan Mahajan, Raju Pradhan and Bhaskar Dev Konwar — said the court allowed her to go on fresh bail of Rs 50,000.

The court rejected the earlier bail on the ground that the case was at the trial stage and compliance of conditions embodied in the earlier bail order was required during investigation of the case.

Deka and her six-year-old ailing son and another Ulfa militant Bimol Hajong were picked up by Goalpara police from the Phulbari area of Meghalaya on October 24.

They were on a bus when the police team on the their trail for nearly seven days finally caught up with them with the help of Meghalaya police.

The police said Deka had planned to cross over to Bangladesh to join her husband Chitraban Hazarika, who is the militant group’s finance secretary, after getting her son treated in Assam.

This was the second time that the Ulfa cultural secretary has been arrested.

She was first taken into custody at Mumbai’s Santa Cruz airport in August, 1997.

Her arrest had sparked a chain of events leading to a much-publicised investigation into alleged funding of Ulfa activities by Tata tea.