Chargesheeted, Black Widow Chief ‘Untraced’

By Samudra Gupta Kashyap

Guwahati, Mar 3 : Niranjan Hojai, the self-styled Commander-in-Chief of the outlawed Dima Halam Daoga (DHD-J) or Black Widow, who was charge sheeted by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) last year, has been missing since he surrendered last October.

Indicating this here on Tuesday, Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi said he was yet to ascertain whether the DHD-J leader was still in a designated camp or was “untraced”. “I don’t know whether he was staying in the designated truce-time camps or not after the surrender ceremony. I will have to find out details about the case,” Gogoi said.

On October 2, 2009, Hojai, who together with DHD-J chairman Jewel Garlosa let loose a reign of terror in Assam’s North Cachar Hills district for several years, led a huge surrender of his followers in the presence of Gogoi at Haflong. His surrender, along with 393 members of the outfit, came months after Garlosa was arrested from Bangalore in last June. Hojai was sent to a designated camp at Haflong after the ceremony.

But by the time the NIA, probing into the first-ever case assigned to it — siphoning off huge sums of development funds by militant groups in Assam’s NC Hills district — came out with its chargesheet on November 17, Hojai was missing. The 14 persons named in the chargesheet on diversion of funds of the North Cachar Hills Autonomous Council to the Dima Halam Daogah (J) included Gorlosa and Hojai.

Meanwhile, unconfirmed reports said Hojai had secretly slipped out of the state and moved to Nepal immediately after the NIA submitted its chargesheet.