Was Rajkhowa arrested as illegal migrant?
Dhananjay Mahapatra, TNN 7 December 2009, 12:46am

NEW DELHI: Was top ULFA leader Arabinda Rajkhowa, who had enjoyed Bangladeshi hospitality all this while, arrested as an illegal migrant pursuing illegal activities and then handed over to India at Dauki on the Meghalaya-Bangladesh border?

If papers filed by prosecution before the chief judicial magistrate while demanding Rajkhowa's police custody are to be believed, it seems the ULFA chairman was bundled out of Bangladesh as an illegal migrant before being handed over to Border Security Force (BSF).

"The coordinate papers about the three -- Rajkhowa and his bodyguard Raja Bora and ULFA `military spokesperson' Raju Baruah -- unequivocally showed that the three were arrested in Bangladesh," prosecution sources told TOI from Guwahati.

The charges pressed against Rajkhowa were one relating to a 1998 extortion case and some provisions of the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), for which the CJM remanded him to police custody for 12 days.

Two facts are significant in Rajkhowa's arrest. First, India does not have an extradition treaty with Bangladesh. Second, there was no formal request for his extradition through proper channels, which begins with a competent court issuing letter rogatory to its counterpart in the foreign country for extradition of the accused for trial in offences committed in India.

In the absence of these two, the arrest of Rajkhowa and his aides clearly shows that they were detained by Bangladeshi authorities and then pushed across to India at a mutually agreed place for the BSF to take them into custody. This is substantiated by Rajkhowa's repeated assertions before media prior to being produced before the CJM that he had not surrendered.

ULFA's self-claimed foreign and finance secretaries -- Sasha Chaudhary and Chitraban Hazarika -- were similarly picked up by Bangladeshi authorities from Uttara area of Dhaka and handed over to BSF at Gakul Nagar in Tripura along the Indo-Bangladesh border.

However, one of the founder members of ULFA and its general secretary Anup Chetia aka Golap Baruah could not be handed over to India despite the present regime promising not to allow its territory to be used by militants inimical to India.

Chetia was arrested in 1997 in Dhaka under Foreigners Act and Passport Act, both indicating that he was treated as an illegal migrant. Since he was convicted under these two Acts and sentenced to imprisonment, he could not be handed over to India and continues to be in prison despite his appeal to United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for grant of political asylum in Bangladesh.



http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/indi ... 308903.cms