Less than 48 hours after being granted bail by a special court of the National Investigation Agency (NIA), Assam peasant leader Akhil Gogoi was rearrested and taken to eastern Assam’s Sivasagar on Thursday.
Special court accepts Akhil Gogoi’s bail plea
A team of Sivasagar police took Mr. Gogoi into their custody at around 5:30 a.m. and left for Sivasagar, about 360 km east of Guwahati. He was lodged at the central jail there and would be in the custody of the Sivasagar police for four days.
The district police said Mr. Gogoi was taken into custody in connection with a December 12, 2019 case for organising an “illegal assembly” of people in Sivasagar. The KMSS members said he had organised a rally to mobilise public opinion against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA).
“He is worried because the police are digging up one old case after another against him. He has sought a list of such cases across the districts,” the peasant leader’s lawyer said.
No chargesheet yet
Some of these cases were registered against Mr. Gogoi after the anti-CAA protests in December 2019 turned violent. He was arrested in one such case registered in eastern Assam’s Jorhat.
The NIA subsequently took him into custody for his alleged links with the CPI (Maosit).
On Tuesday, the NIA’s special court in Guwahati granted him bail after the probe agency failed to file a chargesheet against him within the specified time of 90 days.
