ULFA commander-in-chief Paresh Barua maintained close links with former Bangladesh Prime Minister Khaleda Zias son Tarique Zia,and the two had interacted in at least three meetings,leading to the infamous Chittagong arms haul of April 2004. It was only last week that a senior Army officer in the Northeast had said that Barua was shuttling between his hideouts in Myanmar close to the Chinese province of Yunnan and different countries of Southeast Asia. Barua is also believed to have made a couple of trips to some towns near Kunming,the Yunnan capital in the past two or three years. While the ULFA has five to six important camps there,Barua is also putting up in one of the camps in Myanmar. He keeps shuttling between his hideout in Myanmar and different Southeast Asian countries. But he cannot afford to be one place and keeps returning to Myanmar every now and then, Lt Gen NK Singh,GOC of the Armys 3 Corps at Rangapahar (Nagaland),said last week. While London-based defence journal Janes Intelligence Review,which had broken the story 10 years ago,had immediately blamed Barua and NSCN(IM)s Anthony Shimray for the massive arms trafficking,it has now emerged that Khaleda Zias eldest son Tarique too had a hand in it. Paresh Barua had met Tarique on at least three occasions,two of which were in a posh hotel in Dhaka,to strike the arms smuggling deal. Some sketchy details of one or two of these meetings should be also available with the RAW, an intelligence official said. The Chittagong arms haul had led to the recovery of a huge number of arms and ammunition: 1,290 sub-machine guns,100 tommy guns,400 semi-automatic spot rifles,150 rocket launchers with 40-mm barrels,2,000 grenade launchers,8,400 rockets,25,000 hand grenades,6,392 MG magazines and 18.40 lakh bullets. The ammunition had come from China. While the arms and ammunition arrived in two vessels MV Khwaja and FT Amanat two trawlers reportedly belonging to Barua transported the consignments to the jetty of Chittagong Urea Fertilizer Ltd. There have been reports that Barua personally supervised loading and unloading of the consignments. At least one top Bangladesh intelligence officer,former National Security Intelligence director Wing Commander Sahabuddin Ahmed,was arrested in this case. Ahmed later implicated two more officers,Major General Rezzaqul Haider Choudhury and Brigadier General M Abdur Rehman. There are reports of Ahmed fixing an appointment of one Salman Yousuf Rahman of a Dubai-based company called Abdul Razzaq Yaqoob group with Barua at a safe house in Dhaka in 2003. This meeting was attended by NSI DG M Abdur Rahim and the High Commissioner and Defence Adviser of another country. The most important person present in this meeting was Tarique. Tarique subsequently is said to have had at least two more meetings with the ULFA leader.
