Five days after he did not return, on November 2, the villagers, suspecting foul play, raided the premises of a farm owned by a government doctor and stumbled upon Kalita's decomposed body from a pit in the compound.

Encouraged by the recovery of the body, the villagers, under the banner of the CPI(ML), launched a second mass digging operation yesterday in and around the farm, located near a swamp, and exhumed yet another decomposed body. ``This area is suspected to be a den of the ULFA and we believe there are several bodies buried in the ground here. A lot of people have been missing from the nearby villages for several months,'' said BiswajitChakravarty, a State-level leader of the CPI(ML).

The body found on Thursday is yet to be identified. Its hands and feet were found tied with strings and it has been kept in the Nalbari morgue after post-mortem examination was carried out.

Local villagers say they used to hear screams of people from the place during the night. ``We suspect that they bring people here, torture them and kill them,'' Chakravarty said, pointing fingers of suspicion at the ULFA, which still has some hold in this lower Assam district bordering Bhutan.

Chakravarty said at least 12 villagers from the nearby areas have remained untraced for long. This was corroborated by Nalbari deputy commissioner Ashis Kumar Bhutani, who said at least a dozen persons have remained untraced in the district since January this year.

The CPI(ML) has complained that Kalita was murdered for his criticism of a particular contractor who is alleged to have links with ULFA, and who bagged a contract for building a bridge in the area. While thevillagers onThursday dug up at least two pits suspected to be ``mass graves'' where the ULFA buried the people they eliminated, only one body was recovered. A pair of slippers dug out from one of the pits has been identified as having belonged to another missing villager, Hitesh Kalita. His wife Anita Kalita, who identified the slippers, said her husband had been missing since April 5.

District Superintendent of Police Apurba Jiwan Barua confirmed that the area was a stronghold of the ULFA. ``I had a big encounter with the ULFA soon after I joined as SP here in June, 1997,'' Barua said, adding that the police have registered six to seven cases of missing persons from the area. When asked why the people themselves have come forward to dig the suspected mass graves, Barua said the people have been pushed to the wall. ``The people of rural Nalbari have begun a resistance movement against the armed groups. They have begun to reject extortion notices,'' he said.

Deputy Commissioner Ashis Kumar Bhutani hasconvened a meeting of the local people of Nankar Boira, Banbhag, Khatikuchi and Khata areas of North Nalbari to chalk out a plan of action to find out if more bodies were really lying buried there.