Calcutta: The interrogation of three suspected Kashmiri separatists has revealed plans by the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency to push trained batches of extremists into India through West Bengal, even as the state government sought more security forces from the Central government to plug its porous border with Bangladesh, official sources said.

According to top intelligence officials, three Kashmiri guerrillas arrested in West Bengal this month had confessed that the ISI had a "well laid-out plan" to push trained extremists into India through the Indo-Bangladesh border.

Earlier this month, police and intelligence detectives arrested alleged ISI operative Jamil Akhtar, who is said to have colluded with the hijackers of Indian Airlines flight IC-814 from Kathmandu in Nepal to Kandahar in Afghanistan last December.

Ghulam Mohiuddin Bhatt, a suspected Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen cadre, was arrested immediately after he crossed into India from Bangladesh through the West Bengal border. Zahid Ahmed, a militant belonging to the Hizbul Mujahideen group who had received arms training in Pakistan, was recently picked up from a village near the Indo-Bangla border.

A senior state home department official told IANS on condition of anonymity that "the situation was fast turning grave" as there were several ISI agents hiding in West Bengal, about whom the intelligence sleuths may have no information. Official estimates say that about 30 extremists belonging to different outlawed groups have been arrested in West Bengal during the past year.

About 25 Kashmiri extremists had been arrested, mostly along the Indo-Bangladesh border, in the past five years.

The official said the state government was not in a position to check the growing use of West Bengal as a transit route by militant groups and ISI agents crossing over from Bangladesh to India. The presence of just a few battalions of the paramilitary Border Security Force (BSF) was inadequate to guard the 2,000-km border with Bangladesh, 600 km of which was riverine boundary. Besides Bangladesh, West Bengal has international borders with Nepal and Bhutan.

Apart from checking the movement of terrorists, there has been hardly any stop to the "regular infiltration" from Bangladesh. According to official figures, an average of 1,000 Bangladeshis cross over to West Bengal every day. Many of these people are suspected to be subversives working at the behest of the ISI.

The state government, in a recent communication to the Central government, has said that in order to effectively combat the ISI's increased activities, more para- military forces need to be deployed along the Indo-Bangla boundary, which is now the Pakistani intelligence agency's favored route to smuggle terrorists and arms into India. The government has demanded that at least 34 battalions of BSF be posted in the state.

West Bengal has further demanded that personnel of the Indo-Tibet Border Police (ITBP) be deployed along the border with Nepal keeping in view the topography of the region and the ITBP's expertise in working in mountainous regions.

The Marxist state government has gone on high alert after the seizure of several consignments of explosives last year and the arrest of alleged ISI spies and Kashmiri separatists. The arrest of two suspected LTTE militants from the city airport recently has also added to the worries of the government.

India Abroad News Service