The deputy high commissioner of Pakistan to Bangladesh and his family members narrowly escaped a fatal accident when a speeding bus collided head-on with his diplomatic car in Bijoynagar upazilla under Brahmanbaria district on May 26 at around 11:30 am.
According to media reports, deputy high commissioner Qamar Abbas Khokar along with his wife Rehana Sarwar Khokar, son Mohammad Khokar and daughter Huda Abbas Khokar were going to Moulvibazar district’s Sreemangal upzailla this noon.
Khatihata Highway police Officer-in-Charge (OC) Akul Chandra Biswas said a Duranta Paribahan bus collided with the deputy high commissioner’s private car in the Rampur area and that the impact caused significant damage to the car’s front end.
The OC further stated that the bus helper, Md Saiufl Islam, was detained and the bus was seized following the incident.
Immediately after the accident, another car took the Pakistani deputy high commissioner and members of his family to Sreemangal, where they are scheduled to stay for a couple of days.
However, the bus driver managed to flee from the scene, he said.
Sreemangal upazilla it located at the southwest of Moulvibazar district and borders the Indian state of Tripura. Sreemangal is often referred to as the ‘tea capital’ of Bangladesh, and is most famous for its tea fields. It may be mentioned here that Tripura is located in the extreme southwest corner of the Northeastern states in India. Following India’s independence in 1947, Tripura acceded to the Indian Union in 1948 as a ‘C’ category state. It became a Union Territory in November 1956 and attained full statehood on January 21, 1972 – few days after the independence of Bangladesh.
Tripura’s demography underwent a major change as a result of illegal migrants and refugees from former East Bengal and subsequently from Bangladesh. Tripuris were pushed to the hills and the politics and administration in the state became dominated by the Bengali-speaking and immigrants.
The first militant outfit to form was Tripura National Volunteers (TNV). It was active until 1988. However, most prominent ones were National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) and All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF).
These groups had various demands. NLFT wanted to establish an independent Tripura and ATTF wanted to finalize the Tripura merger agreement. However, all of them wished to remove Bangladeshis immigrants who had entered Tripura after 1950 despite their ideological differences.
Anti-Bengali sentiments of Tripuri rebel groups had given birth to the United Bengali Liberation Front. The group wanted to protect Bengalis in Tripura from militants. This group was supported by the Bengali Dominated Communist Party which supplied arms and infrastructure.
Internal conflicts among them had divided NLFT into NLFT(B) led by Biswamohan Debbarma and NLFT (N) led by Nayanbasi Jamatia. ATTF which was a right-wing organization of NLFT had become its own militant organization led by Ranjit Debbarma.
From the end of 2020, a resurgence has occurred led by the NLFT with incidents of kidnapping workers and killing of a trader marking the emergence of insurgency in the state again. For years, Pakistani spy agency Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) has been giving fund to Tripuri militancy outfits with the agenda of getting Tripura separated from India. It is also learnt from credible source that major segment of ISI funding to Tripuri militancy and insurgency groups are provided in the form of counterfeit Indian currency.
