KOCHI: The police have decided to strengthen surveillance across the district’s major migrant worker camps on the eve of New Year celebrations, including Perumbavoor, Kalamassery, Thrikkakara and Kizhakkambalam.
The move comes in the wake of the Christmas night violence at Kizhakkambalam in which nearly 15 police officers, including an SHO, were injured and a police jeep was set on fire by migrant workers at the Kitex Group’s labour camp.
As per the plan, the rural and city police will together deploy over 1,000 officers in and around the migrant workers’ camps to prevent any untoward incident. A verbal spat broke out between a group of migrant labourers and security staff, which snowballed into a fight at Kizhakkambalam on Saturday night. When police arrived to control the situation, the migrants attacked them and set fire to a police jeep and vandalised another two police vehicles.
“We will have more police force at Kizhakkambalam ahead of New Year’s Eve. Patrolling will be intensified in the areas and a separate team has been constituted for this. If the police find any miscreants, they will be taken into custody immediately. At present, the situation in Kizhakkambalam is completely under control. However, we are vigilant to avoid incidents like the one we witnessed a few days ago, “said Ernakulam Rural SP K Karthick.
Meanwhile, the city police have also adopted a similar strategy. “We have already identified the migrant camps and the sensitive areas in the city. We have already deployed our people as part of beefing up surveillance,” said City Police Commissioner C H Nagaraju.
The excise department is likely to carry out raids on migrant workers’ camps as it has got information that large quantities of ganja and MDMA have been stored in some of them. “The police and excise department have already taken several migrant workers into custody for smuggling the contraband. We will carry out surprise inspections in the camps in the coming days,” said an excise official.
Background of some arrested workers to be checked
Kochi: The special investigation team probing the Kizhakkambalam violence will conduct a detailed background check of a few migrant labourers among the 174 arrested so far in connection with attack on police personnel. On Thursday, the police brought four of the arrested workers to the labour camp, where the violence occurred on the Christmas day, for evidence collection. The probe team also recovered the official ID of a policeman from a room in the camp. Officials said the ID belonged to an officer who was attacked. While three workers who were brought to the camp for evidence collection hailed from Manipur, the other was from Jharkhand.