The Guwahati wing of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) arrested Maoist leader Samrat Chakrabarty from Sodepur near Calcutta on Monday.
Sources in the NIA have said Samrat is a member of the state committee of the CPI (Maoists) and was wanted in a case in Assam. An NIA team from Guwahati had been trying to track Samrat — also known as Nirman — for the past few days following a lead that the Maoist leader was camping somewhere in the Nadia district.
Officials said in the past two days, Samrat’s location, according to the tower of his mobile phone, kept shifting from Nadia to North 24-Parganas. He would even keep his mobile phone switched off frequently, making it even more difficult to zero in on him, they said.
On Monday, the NIA officials tracked him down to a godown on Kalyani Expressway, an artery that connects Kalyani in Nadia to Birati in North 24 Parganas and arrested him. “Samrat has been continuing to build a network in the guise of a labour in the godown,” said a senior NIA official.
“In 2016, he had shifted to Assam from Bengal before deciding to return and take shelter in parts of Nadia and North 24-Parganas.”Senior officers in Bengal police said Samrat had allegedly been involved in Maoist activities during the last leg of the Left Front rule in the state with his role primarily restricted to grooming young recruits and preparing them for an armed rebellion.
“In 2011, Samrat was entrusted with the responsibility of spreading the network in several districts, including Calcutta, Nadia, Mushidabad and Malda,” a senior officer of the state’s intelligence branch said.
Five years later, he shifted his base to Assam with an aim to spread the network, particularly in the tea gardens of the north-eastern states. Samrat’s influence zone includes pockets of Cachar, Karimganj, Dibrugarh and Dhubri districts in Assam and he used to work in tandem with Arun Kumar Bhattacharjee, another leader of the banned outfit who was later arrested.Officers said Samrat returned to Calcutta sometime early this year and went into hiding.
