The Tripura Police said on Thursday that they arrested two insurgents of the Tripura United National Front (TUNF), a new outfit believed to be operating from hideouts in Assam, and seized explosive materials from them, barely hours before Independence Day.
Speaking to indianexpress.com, a police officer said the TUNF’s main aim was to kill police and other security personnel deployed on Independence Day and loot their arms and ammunition.
“On the eve of the Independence Day celebrations, we received specific inputs about a sabotage attempt by a miscreant group having links with a group namely Tripura United National Front (TUNF). The group is still in the formation stage. It has also been planning subversive acts in the Kanchanpur subdivision to get maximum attention on the eve of this Independence Day,” the officer said.
He Said the state police’s intelligence wing had been closely monitoring inputs from the ground for the past 48 hours in coordination with the North Tripura district police to track the insurgents’ movements.
The officer said the police laid an ambush on Kanchanpur-Vangmun Road in North Tripura and, around 5.40 pm, caught Sadai Nanda Reang, who hails from Damcherra in the same district, and Dhananjoy Reang of Assam’s Hailakandi district. “High-end explosive materials were recovered from them,” added the officer, who didn’t wish to be named.
While insurgency has been at an all time low in Tripura, courtesy of en masse surrenders and peace deals signed with the Central Government in the past few years, the new outfit has been trying to gain traction, according to the police.
On September 24 last year, three weeks after the Government of India signed a quadripartite memorandum of settlement with the Tripura Government and the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), and the All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF), over 580 cadres of both outlawed insurgent groups surrendered at the headquarters of the Tripura State Rifles’ seventh battalion at Jampuijala, 40 km from Agartala, ending their five-decade-long insurgency.
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Chief Minister Manik Saha then announced that Tripura had turned into an insurgency-free state.
Insurgency largely came down during the Left Front Government’s rule, when lucrative offers of an instant grant of Rs 1.5 lakh, vocational training, and a Rs 2,000 stipend prompted insurgents to give up arms.
Although armed insurgency in Tripura dates back to 1967, when a small outfit called Sengkrak took up arms, the thick of insurgency came in the late ’80s, when groups such as the NLFT and the ATTF rose. While most of these have largely been defunct, a small NLFT faction is said to be active in Bangladesh.