A 25-year-old man from Assam is missing after he and another construction worker were abducted from Arunachal Pradesh’s Longding district on Friday. Three cadres of a militant group were killed on Sunday by security forces in an operation linked to the abduction.
According to a Ministry of Defence statement, the two construction workers were abducted on the night of April 25 from Pangchao, around 28 kilometres from the Longding district headquarters. Longding Superintendent of Police Dekio Gumja told that they were working there under a contractor to construct a local school.
The contractor told police they had not received a ransom demand, but police suspect the incident is an extortion-related abduction carried out by the Myanmar-based National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang-Yung Aung) or NSCN (KYA).
According to a statement by a Ministry of Defence spokesperson, “Based on specific intelligence, troops of the Indian Army and the Assam Rifles launched a joint operation in the general area Pangchao on April 27. Contact was established, and in the ensuing firefight, three cadres of the NSCN (KYA) group were neutralised. Four automatic weapons, ammunition and other war-like stores were also recovered in the operation.”
While one of the workers, Wangpana, a local from the area, was rescued in the operation, the other, who police have identified as 25-year-old Giyasudin from Assam’s Sribhumi district, remains missing.
“The gunfight took place on Sunday morning, and now search operations are taking place. Weapons from the HK series were retrieved from the three bodies, but there were no IDs on them, and they have not yet been identified. The whereabouts of the second worker is not yet known,” said SP Gumja.
Longding is situated along the porous Indo-Myanmar border in Arunachal Pradesh, and is also close to border areas in neighbouring Nagaland. It is one of the three districts of the state where the Disturbed Areas notification of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act is in place, and has seen several instances of kidnapping and extortion by rebel groups.
