New Delhi:
After five hours of holding an entire train hostage, the attackers melted into the forests of Banstala in West Bengal. They were reportedly members of the People's Committee against Police Atrocities.
NDTV travelled into the same forests and found it surprisingly easy to track them down. They needed no persuasion to own up to the train-jacking.
We find Dhanpati Mahato, who says he was instrumental in yesterday's incident. "We thought if we stopped the train, the DRM or some other officials would come ...the PCPA never stopped trains before...we wanted to warn the Centre," he says in Hindi.
At 2.30 on Tuesday afternoon, the Rajdhani from Bhubaneshwar to Delhi was stopped in West Bengal's Midnapore district with 1200 passengers on board. For five hours, the passengers were stranded, though unharmed. Then, central reserve police forces arrived, forcing the attackers to run away.
The Orissa police had said within minutes of the train attack that the two drivers of the train had been kidnapped. Not true, says the PCPA; in fact, they say they took the drivers were missing for a while only because they were enjoying a cup of tea.
"We had put up a red shirt to stop the train. We knew there were many women and children. If the train had not stopped, there would have been an accident. When the train stopped, we told the drivers to come out and sit. After that they were sitting at a tea shop and we never did any harm to them."
Two FIRs have been filed into this attack., and the authorities say they have not found any concrete leads so far. A startling claim given that it took less than 12 hours to find some of those wanted.