‘Over 400 madrassas in neighbouring Bangladesh are being directly funded by Bin Laden, the most hounded terrorist on the globe. In those madrassas about 25,000 youths are being trained to become members of a suicide squad. It is an ominous development as far as North East is concerned,’ said P A Sangma, the founder of the North East People’s Forum (NEPF). Talking to this newspaper on the sideline of a NEPF Press conference today, the former Lok Sabha Speaker and NCP leader said he has clippings of news-items appearing in Bangladesh newspapers to substantiate what he said. He said such activities of terrorists like Bin Laden in the neighbouring country posed extreme threat to the North East region and there had been unabated illegal flow of people to the region fro m that country which was harbouring fundamentalist’.
Earlier, addressing newsmen along with Sri Sangma on the eve of formal launching of NEPF, the Chief Minister of Nagaland, Neiphu Rio termed Assam as the ‘exporter’ of illegal Bangladeshi migrants to all other North Eastern States. ‘When suspected Bangladeshi nationals are arrested by police in my State, they promptly produce documents to prove their Indian citizenship. All such documents bear the seal of Assam Government,’ Rio said adding that continuation of the IM(DT) Act in Assam has made it almost impossible to deport Bangladeshi migrants from the State. He said as per the statistics available with Nagaland police at least one lakh illegal migrants from Bangladesh were trying to settle down in foothills areas of Nagaland bordering Assam.
The Nagaland Chief Minister further
stated that the problem of insurgency in the region was a ‘national one’,
which could not be solved at regional level . He said it started in Nagaland
decades ago and spread to other North Eastern States. He, however, termed
the insurgency in Nagaland as a political problem which needed a political
solution.