Suspected militants of the Adivasi National Liberation Army (ANLA) recently abducted the manager of a tea garden in Assam's Jorhat District.
According to preliminary reports, Moon Mahanta, the manager of the Lakshminijan Tea Garden, which is situated in the Titabor sub-division of Jorhat District, was abducted by three armed men, and dragged towards Nagaland.
At the time of his abduction, he was distributing wages to tea garden estate workers.
The militants are also reported to have taken away all the cash meant for distribution to the garden workers.
Police and paramilitary forces have launched a massive manhunt to trace the manager.
Aunima, an eye witness to the abduction, said: "They (militants) came from the other side. They were three of them. They beat him (manager) up and took him way to the hill side. After that, we do not know what they did to him."
People living along the Assam-Nagaland border are mainly engaged in daily labour in tea gardens and are frequently harassed by militant groups who demand money, and destroy tea bushes if they are not paid.
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In recent times, tea growers in Assam's Dibrugarh and Sibsagar Districts have also received extortion threats from ULFA's anti-talk faction.
Babul Gowala, the Titabor unit president of AATSA, said: "This is not the first time such an incident is occurring here. The laborers are frequently harassed. It is very disturbing for us. Especially in this area the government should set up police outposts so that such incidents do not happen again."
Though the overall level of violence in the north east has come down in recent times, kidnappings, extortions and killings continue to be a cause of concern.