Large cache of grenades found in Tripura, defused

Agartala, May 20 (IANS) Over 150 grenades, recovered by the police from beneath the soil in northern Tripura, have been defused by army experts, police said on Saturday.

The 151 grenades, buried at Gaurnagar in northern Tripura, were recovered by the police last week.

"Experts from army's divisional headquarters at Masimpur (near Silchar in southern Assam) came on Friday and defused the grenades," northern Tripura's Unokoti district police chief Ajit Pratap Singh told reporters.

He said students found the grenades while playing near a central school at Gaurnagar. They informed their elders, who immediately alerted the police, who rushed to the area and recovered the grenades after digging up the soil.

Local villagers said that the grenades might have been buried during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 when the sovereign country emerged.

Historian Bikach Chowdhury said Tripura had six to seven camps in four sectors from where the Bangladeshi 'Mukti Joddhas' (freedom fighters) fought Pakistani forces after being trained in Tripura.

"Over 1,600,000 Bangladeshis -- a number larger than the state's then total population of 1,500,000 -- had taken shelter in Tripura alone," he said.

The nine-month-long "Mukti Juddho" (Liberation War) later turned into a full-scale India-Pakistan War, leading to the surrender of nearly 93,000 Pakistani soldiers in Dhaka on December 16, 1971.

Tripura shares 856 km borders with Bangladesh.

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