Armed tribal youths arrested in Tripura

Agartala, April 5 (IANS) Even as union Home Minister P. Chidambaram was visiting Mizoram over the Reang refugees repatriation issue, security forces arrested five Reang tribal youths with arms at a refugee camp in northern Tripura, police said here Thursday.

"During a special operation, the paramilitary Assam Rifles troopers arrested five tribal youths from Naising Para refugee camp in north Tripura Wednesday night," a police spokesman told reporters here.

The police official said two improvised guns and three revolvers were recovered from the tribal youths, aged between 22 and 28 years, who were inmates of the refugee camp.

Later, the Assam Rifles troopers handed them over to police.

Following ethnic tensions after the killing of a Mizo forest official in Mizoram, over 41,000 Reang tribal refugees - locally called Bru - had taken shelter in six camps in north Tripura's Kanchanpur sub-division in October 1997.

The Mizoram government occasionally raised allegations that a section of Reang refugees have become involved in terrorism and were trying to create violence in Mizoram, bordering Myanmar and Bangladesh.