Or Baban Das (22), Kamal Das (35), Rajeswar Das (32) and Pramode Das (32), who had all come from the Vaishali district of Bihar to work in a brick kiln at Hatigarh-Balipara under the Duliajan police station. All were on a seasonal contract to work at hardly Rs 70 a day. All of them are now dead.

Javed Sheikh (25) sold clothes at the local marketplace in Longsowal, hardly 15 km east of Tinsukia. He and five others, Binod Kumar Gupta (45), Digan Prasad Gupta (60), Arvind Prasad Gupta (32), Manoj Kumar Gupta (42), Arvind Kumar Gupta (13), all died on the spot as two armed militants who came on a motorbike, opened fire at the marketplace around the same time last evening.

Away at Ghoramara, a chapori (temporary island) on the Brahmaputra, east of Sadiya, 13 persons were killed, all around 8:30 last night. But the place is so inaccessible — no telephone, no mobile, no road, only country-boats can reach — that the news of the massacre reached the nearest Sadiya police station only this morning.

The police in Tinsukia seem to have lost count of the number of incidents, not to speak of bodies. Tinsukia SP Prasanta Bhuyan is still not sure whether to put the death figures at 32 or 33.

“So many people have been killed. And it is all over, at as many as eight locations,” he says.

“Most of the places are remote and inaccessible. The people are soft targets and most vulnerable,” says Bhuyan. Ghoramara, under Sadiya police station, for instance, can be reached only after crossing three channels of the Brahmaputra and walking for two hours.

... contd.