Kareena Eugene
In the early hours of Wednesday, 21st od April 2021, three employees of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC) were allegedly abducted from a rig site in the Lakwa field, Sivasagar District in Assam.
The authorities of the Company suspect thet the banned militant organisation United Liberation Front of Asom (Independent)(ULFA-I) is behind the said abduction.
ONGC is India’s biggest oil and gas exploration and production company and, they have been exploring and producing oil and gas in Upper Assam since the early 1960s.
On Wednesday morning, the ONGC mentioned that the employees were taken by “unknown armed miscreants” in a vehicle belonging to ONGC, in a series of tweets.
The vehicle was later found abandoned near the Nimonagarh jungles, close to the Assam-Nagaland border.
Sivasagar SP, Amitava Sinha told IndianExpress.com that, “all the three abducted are local residents”. They also added that they have asked for the Nagaland security agencies to be on alert.
Sinha also added that, “Nagaland is very close to the actual location of the incident-the car was found abandoned near the Nagaland border. So, Police in Nagaland’s Mon district have also been activated”.
The three employees abducted have been identified as Mohini Mohan Gogoi (Junior Technician, Production) from the Sivasagar district, Alokesh Saikia (Assistant Junior Engineer, Production) from the Jorhat district and Ritul Saikia (Assistant Junior Engineer, Production) from the Golaghat district.
SP Sinha said that, “The manner — the way they came and the way they took them — in which it has been makes us believe that it is the handiwork of the ULFA. It has to be some militant group. We are suspecting ULFA because that is the only militant group active in this area”.
In December 2020, ULFA(I) and Myanmar-faction of NSCN(K) had abducted two employees of the Quippo Oil and Gas Infrastructure Limited from Kumchaikha Hydrocarbon drilling site near Innao, Changlang district of Arunachal Pradesh. They were released in April 2021.