Zeenews Bureau
West Bengal: In what may be described as sheer irony and apathy towards booking the real offenders, the Railways on Thursday lodged an FIR against the hijackers of Bhubaneswar-New Delhi Rajdhani Express, without mentioning the Maoist backed PCPA, which was responsible for the obnoxious incident.
The FIR was lodged against ‘unknown people’, thus ruling out any possibility of action being taken against the PCPA behind the hijack drama.
The Bhubaneswar-New Delhi Rajdhani Express was taken hostage by armed tribals at Banstala Halt Station near Jhargram on Tuesday. It was a pre-planned move by Maoists using the People’s Committee Against Police Atrocities (PCPA) at the front.
The move laid bare that PCPA’s links with Maoists, which is why Maoist squads took position amid the neighbouring Panisole forests to protect the agitators on the railway tracks.
The “blockade” was planned on a day when a sizeable section of the district police had fanned out along the 7km stretch from Panskura in East Midnapore to Chowringhee, the gateway to Midnapore town, to oversee the route by which chief secretary Asok Mohan Chakrabarti, director general of police Bhupinder Singh, and five other senior IAS officers were coming to Midnapore from Kolkata. A huge police force was also deployed to escort the convoy from Chowringhee to Midnapore town.
PCPA supporters gathered at the railway tracks minutes before the Rajdhani Express was about to arrive.
Even after the PCPA leader Santosh Patra went on air making claims of the hijack, the railways failed to see their involvement.
