The Kalahandi police on Tuesday identified the contractor and his four henchmen, who chopped the hands of two contract labourers when they refused to go outside the State for working there.
Talking to mediapersons, Inspector General of Police, South-Western, YK Jethwa said that the police had already identified the persons involved in the crime and started a manhunt to nab them. In order to speed up the investigation, three police teams have been formed to nab the contractor and his aides, he added.
Kalahandi SP Sarthak Sarangi said the fellow villagers of the victims helped police identify the perpetrators who threw away the victims at a roadside after chopping their right hands on Monday evening. “Our teams are searching in and outside of the district and we hope to arrest the culprits very soon,” Sarangi said. On the other hand, Assistant labour Commissioner PK Baliarsingh said that they would take appropriate action against the contractor according to the provision of the law.
Meanwhile, two victims Nilambar Dhangada Majhi and Pialu Dhangada Majhi from Nuaguda under the Jayapatna police station were struggling for life at the District Headquarters Hospital at Bhawanipatna. The district administration assured the victims of providing free treatment. Notably, the labour contractor from Sinapali area of Nuapada district was taking the victims, along with ten others, from their village to Chhattisgarh for working in brick kilns.
The labourers from Nuaguda village had taken an advance of Rs 14,000 each from the contractor with a promise that they would go to Andhra Pradesh as labourers after harvesting their paddy crop. But before completion of the harvest work, the contractor reached Nuaguda and forcibly was ferrying away 12 people from the village in a Bolero jeep on Sunday.
On the way, 10 out of the 12 labourers managed to flee from the clutches of the contractor near Belpada under the Borda police outpost area in Kalahandi, but Nilambar and Pialu could not. Angry at the escape of the other labourers, the middleman chopped the right hands of both. “If you are not going to work for us, you will not be able to work for anybody,” the contractor and his henchmen reportedly told them.