While the railway and road construction engineers have refused to come back, the Doordarshan authorities have also shut shop and fled to nearby Cachar district after reportedly getting an extortion note of Rs five lakh from the militants.
All the six Doordarshan employees manning the Haflong Low Power Transmitter (LPT) located in the district headquarters town have fled following an extortion demand by the Dima Halam Daogah (Jewel) faction, also known as Black Widow.
Doordarshan sources at Guwahati confirmed the report today and said here that the relay centre had been shut down for the past two weeks, depriving viewers of the region. The transmission centre is headed by an assistant engineer and about five lakh viewers have been affected.
Deputy Commissioner S Jagannthan told newspersons that security at the Doordarshan centre had been augmented after the district administration came to know of the extortion demand but the Doordarshan employees have refused to report back asserting that it was not safe.
Meanwhile, the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which has been systematically investigating the functioning of the District Council amidst reports of widespread diversion of government funds to the coffer of the terrorist group Dima Halao Daoga (DHD) were reportedly stunned at the amount of the diverted funds.
The scale of involvement between the District Council members and the terrorists has also forced the Congress not to welcome the 20-odd members of the District Council who have expressed willingness to join the ruling party.
”We will think about their inclusion only after end of the NIA probe,” Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi said, admitting that scale of the diversion was truly large.
Already Chief Executive Member Mohit Hojai, the most important bureaucrat of the council R H Khan and DHD chairman Jewel Garlosa were cooling their heels in jail.
District Administration sources from Haflong informed that fearing that NIA team would arrest the offending officers, many of them were trying to flee while some were caught burning sensitive financial documents.
Meanwhile, Mr Jaganthan informed that no major violence was reported from any part of the district in the last 24 hours. The security forces have also not recorded any significant breakthrough as the terrorists were holed up in the jungles of the NC Hills and had declared three month long ceasefire.
This has not, however, improved the ground condition, as neither has it returned the confidence of the masses, nor the passenger railway services have resumed so far, which has been suspended for more than three months now.