The Assam Police have busted a training camp believed to have been set up by a jihadi outfit in a village in Chirang district in western Assam on Friday and recovered eight crude hand-made AK-47 rifles that were concealed in a pit. While four persons have been apprehended so far, the police are looking for at least ten persons who were undergoing training there. Confirming this, Ranjan Bhuyan, SP of Chirang district said while three persons were arrested Wednesday following a tip-off that some people were undergoing arms training in a particular village, it led to arrest of a fourth person on Friday night. “The fourth person led us to a pit behind a house in village Daukhanagar from where we recovered eight crude handmade AK-47 rifles and two Insas rifles,” the SP said. “Though interrogation is on, we are yet to ascertain the exact identity of these persons as also who exactly could be behind this training camp. It looks like a new Islamic outfit which could have links with jihadi elements,” SP Bhuyan said. The person who led the police to the recovery identified himself as Sayed Miyan and claimed he was a daily-wage labourer, he said. Police in Guwahati suspect that some Islamic terror groups had started recruiting Muslim boys in the Bodoland districts of Chirang, Kokrajhar and Baksa with an intention of triggering off fresh violence during the run-up to the 2016 state assembly elections. The three Bodoland districts had witnessed major clashes between Muslim migrants and indigenous Bodo tribals in 2012 and immediately after the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, leading to over 100 deaths. Bhuyan said the police have collected names of the ten persons who were undergoing training in the village, but all of them had disappeared even before the police reached village Daukhanagar. “Some of the trainees were from Chirang district, a few were from other districts. We have launched a manhunt for them,” the SP said. It was in December last year that police had arrested one Sahanur Alom, an important Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB) operative from a village near Sarthebari in Barpeta district, not very far from where the training camp was busted on Friday. Alom, one of the prime accused in the Burdwan (West Bengal) blast, was a key person who had allegedly engaged in propagating jihadi ideology and carrying out recruitments in different districts in Assam. “We are yet to ascertain whether Friday’s recovery and the training camp in Daukhanagar village have links to any JMB module. But investigations are on and we are looking for several persons,” the Chirang SP said. Regarding the handmade AK-47 rifles, SP Bhuyan said those were not just dummies that are generally used by different terror groups to initiate fresh recruits but were crude guns that could actually fire and kill a person. “A few days ago we had also recovered several sets of camouflage uniforms from another village in the same area,” he said.
