Six bamboo sticks, some tarpaulin and a tin sheet. It was over this and other similar structures in the sanctuary that resulted in violence leaving casualties.
Team Clarion
NEW DELHI — A Muslim mother of two was killed and six other persons sustained injuries as violence erupted in Assam’s Bura Chapori Wildlife Sanctuary on Monday.
While a forester and two home guards sustained injuries, Rahima Khatun was killed in “retaliatory firing”. Three of her relatives were among those injured, including her husband, an Indian Express report said on Wednesday.
Six bamboo sticks, some tarpaulin and a tin sheet. It was over this and other similar structures in the sanctuary that resulted in violence leaving casualties.
A reserve forest in a wetland and grassland area in Sonitpur district, reaching the site from the nearest village involves rowing across two water bodies. The picturesque location first made news in February, when it was at the centre of a massive eviction exercise during which the forest department cleared 1,282 hectares of land where more than 2,000 people had set up homes, the report said.
While the eviction itself had been peaceful – most people left before the bulldozers arrived – five months later, the area has now witnessed violence.
The forest department claims those who had been evicted in February were trying to resettle there. On Monday, a forest department team led by the Divisional Forest Officer of Nagaon Wildlife, Jayanta Deka, arrived at the site and confrontation between the two sides escalated.
Khatun (40) leaves behind her husband Samser Ali – who also suffered a gunshot wound and was hospitalised – and her two children. Ever since the eviction, along with other evicted families, Khatun’s family had been living a few hundred metres away in kutcha houses. On Sunday, they had put up the tarpaulin structure at the spot where their house had been demolished.
According to her niece, Farida Khatun, seven members of the family had taken their sheep and cows there that evening because the water level had risen due to rains and reached their cowshed.
However, forest department officials have called this setting up of tarpaulin tents a “tactic” to lay claim on the land again, and said there have been multiple attempts to resettle there since the eviction, the report said.
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Kin of the victim in Bura Chapori Wildlife Sanctuary. — Express photo
