Perumbavoor in Kerala’s Ernakulam district is yet to get over the shock of hearing the news that an Al Qaeda terrorist has been arrested by the National Investigation Agency from a town suburb in the early hours of Saturday.

By the time the town woke up on Saturday morning, Iyakub Biswas and Mosaraf Hossen had been nabbed and taken away to the NIA’s safe house in Kochi. Even the Kerala Police came to know about the arrests only after the Al Qaeda activists were safely put into the NIA custody.

It has been widely known that Perumbavoor has become a safe haven for Maoists on the run as well as Islamic extremist elements. Former chief of Kerala Police T P Senkumar and former director general of police Jacob Thomas had warned the Kerala Government many times about the influx of terrorists to Kerala, especially to Perumbavoor.

“The town is home to more than 800 plywood companies and hundreds of quarries.

 Most of these units depend on migrant workers because it is difficult to get local residents for the low salaries offered by the entrepreneurs. The migrant workers, mostly from Bengal and Assam are willing to work for as little as Rs 800 per day,” said S Sasidharan, entrepreneur who owns timber mills and plywood packaging units.

The town shot into national attention in 2016 when a local teenager Jisha was found murdered. “The Police arrested a migrant worker allegedly from Bengal. There were more such murders and the accused were migrant workers,” said Sasidharan.

Both Senkumar and Thomas had alerted the Government about the dangers posed by the unprecedented arrival of migrant laborers. “It is difficult to distinguish the Bengali workers from that of Bangladeshi workers because they have the same physique and slang,” said T G Mohandas, columnist.

There are no official records about the workers who come to Kerala in search of livelihood. But political intervention led to the shooting down of all moves to introduce an identification system to  tag the migrant workers in the town.