Jorhat, Sep 4 : An apparent attempt to smuggle two elephants from Assam to Bangladesh was foiled at the last moment after the forest department seized the animals from near Hillara railway station in Cachar district a few days back.
Both elephants, a mother and her calf, were stolen from Jorhat district and were made to walk for 18 days non-stop before the owner and forest department personnel traced them to Cachar.
The forest department had sounded an alert all over the state after the owner, Paramhansh Singh, lodged a complaint on August 5 on the missing elephants.
“The elephants were made to walk on the railway tracks all through the way,” the divisional forest official of Hailakandi, Isfat Ahmed, told The Telegraph over phone. He said there were no valid documents available with the two persons — Moinul Haq and Abdul Jabbar — who were found with the animals.
“The elephants were being taken to Kailashahar in Tripura on the Indo-Bangladesh border. In all probability the animals would have been smuggled to Bangladesh,” Ahmed said.
Haq and Jabbar said they were supposed to take the elephants to Badarpur in Cachar district from where they would have been handed over to someone called Sattar.
Singh, the owner of the elephants and a brick kiln owner in Demow in Sivasagar district, said he had bought the two elephants — the mother around 45 years and the two-and-a-half-year-old calf — from one Sarbeswar Narah in Sadiya in July 2009.
Singh subsequently recruited a mahout, Rampriya Das, to look after the elephants with a salary of Rs 5,000 per month. Das, who stays in Jorhat, had brought the two elephants here from Demow in October “so that he could look after the elephants properly”.
However, when Singh went to Bihar in July this year, Rampriya allegedly sold the two elephants to someone at Kailashahar in Tripura. Finally on August 30, Singh, with the help of forest department personnel, tracked down the elephants near Hillara railway station. The two elephants are now in the custody of the forest department.
Social Plugin