Staff Reporter
ITANAGAR, 19 Jul: Kurung Kumey DC Nighee Bengia on Tuesday informed that officials have been sent to Damin to follow up on the case of the 19 BRO labourers who have gone missing for the last 14 days now.
“The officials will be reaching (Damin) by tonight, and proper confirmed details will be received only by Wednesday,” the DC said.
He said that he received an unconfirmed information through the Damin CO on Tuesday that “no single dead body has been retrieved from Damin.” However, he said, “this can be properly confirmed only when the team reaches Koloriang.”
Speaking to reporters, the proprietor of BT Enterprise, Bengia Bado, informed that 30 Muslim labourers from Assam had reached Koloriang on 5 July. “One of the contractors, Rehman Ali, brought 20 labourers, out of whom 19 are said to be missing,” he said.
Bado informed that “an agreement had been made between the contractor and the labourers for a stipulated period of time and one could not leave the location till then.”
He blamed Ali, saying that Ali “left the site on 19 June on the pretext of his uncle’s death and later his phone was switched off.
“Had he been in station, the labourers could not have fled from the location,” he said, and dismissed the allegation that he refused to grant leave to the labourers for Eid. “Since an agreement with the contractor was already signed, they were not supposed to leave randomly,” he said, adding that “many festivals have been celebrated at the work site itself.”
Ali cannot be contacted since then, Bado said, and added that the report of one of the labourers’ body having been found “is not yet confirmed.”
