ATTF's involvement established in Agartala serial blasts

Agartala, Oct 14 (UNI) The involvement of banned militant outfit All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF) in the recent Agartala serial blasts has been established with the statement of arrested ATTF cadres even as police suspected the backing of international terrorist organisations in the incident.

Police arrested two tribal youths Shanti Debbarma and Angad Santhal, activists of the ATTF, yesterday following recovery of bomb-making materials from a house in Agartala and subsequently produced them before the court and the court sent them to ten days police custody.

Police informed that both the activists had carried the explosives from Khowai to Agartala and the entire blueprint was prepared in the hideout at Agartala, which was busted by the police on October 12.

CID officials suspected that ATTF had got technical support from some other professional organisations and indicated that ISI-backed Harkat-Ul-Jihad-Islami (HuJI) had active involvement in the incident, as the nature of Agartala blasts and the materials used were quiet similar to the ones carried out at Bangalore, Ahmedabad and Delhi.

A hardcore ATTF activist Dinesh Debbarma was arrested in Khowai on October 12 and during interrogation he revealed ATTF's involvement in the blasts. Accordingly, police tracked down and arrested two fugitive youths, barely 24 hours after busting their rented house where explosives for the October 1 serial blasts were allegedly assembled.

After the hideout bust in the Bhati Abhaynagar area of Agartala, police picked up a worker of the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura (INPT) - Budhi Debbarma.

''We detained Debbarma for interrogation because he had introduced the two tribal youths who had rented the house of Satyajit Roy,'' officer-in-charge of West Agartala police station Subrata Chakraborty said, adding that they had prepared a list of tenants by conducting a house-to-house search and to find out how many tenants had left on the eve of October 1 or immediately after the blasts.

The search operation in tribal houses in the town has, however, sparked resentment among tribal residents of Krishnanagar where almost all the senior leaders of the Opposition INPT reside.

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