Kolkata: Tension grew in a village near the India-Bangladesh border at Dinhata subdivision in West Bengal's Cooch Behar district on Wednesday after some construction workers recovered a Pakistani mortar shell while digging. 

When one of the construction workers first noticed the shell, he mistook it as some ordinary explosive and panicked.

The local police and Border Security Force (BSF) were informed.

A BSF team rushed to the spot and after examining the item, confirmed that it was a Pakistani mortar shell. The BSF personnel immediately deactivated it, bringing relief to the local people.

Dinhata Sub-Divisional Police Officer, Dhiman Mitra said that the construction workers came across the shell while undertaking some digging work for some construction purposes.

"Later the BSF personnel deactivated it. There is nothing to panic about," he said.

However, police sources said that while recovery of mortar shells is nothing unnatural in that area which is close to the international border and a BSF unit is posted there, "the question is how a Pakistani mortar shell was brought to that place and subsequently buried under the soil".

"It is yet to be clear who had brought the shell there and with what intention,” a state police official said.

Already intelligence and security agencies have enhanced the surveillance and other related security measures at the villages adjacent to the state’s international borders, both land and coastal, apprehending a rise of illegal infiltration from the neighbouring country amid the ongoing crisis situation there.

Intelligence and security agencies are on special alert following inputs that of late, there has been a rise in the number of outsiders residing at many villages adjacent to the borders after hiring rooms there. There are intelligence inputs of activists of Bangladesh-based fundamentalist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HUT) trying to be active in the bordering villages and making attempts to open sleeper cells there.

(IANS)