CALCUTTA, April 13: Frustrating the interrogators' attempts to make him spill the beans, arrested vice-chairman of the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA), Pradeep Gogoi, has maintained that he had no knowledge of the current hideout of the two most important leaders of the outfit - chairman Arabinda Rajkhowa and ``commander-in-chief'' Paresh Barua. In fact, he has made contradictory statements on the query at different sessions of interrogation over the past four days.While he told his questioners at one stage that Rajkhowa and Barua were in Bangladesh, he later retracted the statement to suggest that they were staying in the capital of some `south-east Asian country', probably Bangkok.
One senior official of the interrogation team said, on condition of anonymity, that Gogoi, after all, ``might be telling the truth''. He gave two reasons for this line of thought; one, the top ULFA leaders kept shifting from one hideout to another, and more importantly, Gogoi may have been deliberately kept in thedark about certain ULFA secrets.
According to the official, the interrogators were veering round to the view that Gogoi was being marginalised in the ULFA. His health - he suffers from spondylitis and acute back pain - had of late made his movements restricted.
He had been apprehended twice before and the ULFA leadership apparently left him out of certain operations, fearing that he might be taken captive again.Another possible reason for Barua keeping some secrets away from Gogoi was his pro-talks inclinations. It was Rajkhowa and Gogoi who had caved in to former Assam chief minister Hiteswar Saikia's attempts to bring the outfit to the negotiating table. It was Barua who not only scuttled the attempts but forced the other two leaders to go underground again.
But Gogoi's position on negotiations had been known all this time. ``He has given us very little beyond what we already knew,'' said the official, adding that much of what is appearing in newspaper reports was ``pure kite-flying.''
The deputyinspector general of Assam Police, Khagendra Sharma has, meanwhile, denied some reports which had been attributed to him. Gogoi also continued to baffle the interrogating team on why and how he had come to Calcutta. In an interview to the BBC on Saturday, Paresh Barua had claimed that Gogoi ``had been sent to Calcutta for medical check-up''. But Gogoi is believed to have told the police here that he had come to Calcutta from his hideout on the India-Bhutan border on his way to Dhaka, where the outfit's general secretary, Anup Chetia, is facing a trial.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
