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The lull has been punctured in the troubled Dima Hasao hill district of Assam where suspected ultras gunned down an executive engineer of the irrigation department on Friday outside his office at Haflong.
Police informed that two persons in an autorickshaw called out the executive engineer Rajiv Kumar Pathak from his office and shot him dead on the road after a brief exchange. The assailants fled the scene in the same autorickshaw towards the crowded Haflong market.
The autorickshaw driver told the police that the assailants sounded like Nagas. Police have launched a manhunt to nab the culprits.
The Dima Hasao hill district has been a hotbed of insurgents since 1990s. However, there has been a period of lull in the hill district of late in the wake of two factions of the militant Dima Halam Daogah -- DHD (Nunisa) and DHD (Jewel Garlosa) -- coming over ground for a dialogue with the Government of India.
However, NSCN rebels from different factions from neighbouring Nagaland are active in the hill district. Two other insurgent groups, a DHD faction led by one Action Dimasa and the newly-formed United Dimasa Kachari Liberation Front are also active.
The NSCN rebels have been trouble makers in the hill district because of rampant extortions and abductions resorted to by them.
It was the NSCN rebels who initially promoted Dimasa tribe insurgent groups in the hill district. Now, with influential Dimasa tribe militants entering into a peace process with the government of India, the Naga rebels have started creating trouble in the hill district.