The Assam police have arrested 14 persons in connection with the abduction of three employees of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) Limited from a workover rig site in Charaideo district’s Lakwa on Wednesday.
Charaideo is within the jurisdiction of police in the adjoining Sivasagar district.
Police have also confirmed the involvement of the banned United Liberation Front of Asom-Independent (ULFA-I) in the abduction of the three men – junior technicians Mohini Mohan Gogoi and Ritul Saikia and junior engineering assistant Alakesh Saikia.
Sivasagar’s Superintendent of Police Amitava Sinha told journalists that the 14 were “overground workers” of the ULFA-I and had carried out activities for the banned outfit. “Ten of the 14 arrested have been taken on police remand and are being interrogated for more information regarding the abduction,” he said.
Police had also interrogated the driver of ONGC’s ambulance in which the three employees were taken away by five armed men. The ambulance was later found abandoned near the Nagaland border.
ONGC and other exploration majors normally keep an ambulance at oil rigs for any emergency.
A central intelligence officer said “multiple security agencies” had been activated in Assam and Nagaland to trace and rescue the three ONGC officials.
The Centre is learnt to have taken the abduction of the trio – all from Assam – more seriously than the abduction of two employees of New Delhi-based oil exploration firm Quippo Oil and Gas Infrastructure Limited by ULFA-I members in December 2020. The outfit had threatened to kill the duo, one of them from Bihar, but released them at two separate locations on the India-Myanmar border in the first week of April.
Like the two Quippo employees, the three ONGC employees are believed to have been taken to Myanmar, where the ULFA-I operates from the hideout of the Khaplang faction of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN)
Meanwhile, Thuingaleng Muivah, general secretary of the Isak-Muivah faction of NSCN, returned to the outfit’s camp at Hebron near Dimapur in Nagaland amid the rapid spread of the novel coronavirus in New Delhi.