GUWAHATI /AGARTALA, Jan 3 (TIWN): Six days after a 14-year-old girl was allegedly gang raped in a military coach of Howrah-Amritsar Express, the railway police have arrested two BSF personnel from Guwahati who were brought to Howrah Saturday.

The two accused, identified as Pankaj Kumar and Balakram Yadav, were produced before the chief judicial magistrate’s court which remanded them to 14 days of judicial custody, Superintendent of Railway Police, Howrah, Mehmood Akhtar said.

The absconders, police said, were trying to board a flight from Guwahati’s Lokpriya Gopinath Bordoloi International Airport to travel to Agartala when they were apprehended Friday by the Intelligence branch of the CISF (or Central Industrial Security Force).

CISF spokesperson Hemender Singh sought to clarify by emphasizing that the arrested men are “not Army jawans” as had been wrongly reported in some sections of the media. He confirmed that the arrested men belong to the BSF, stationed at Gokulnagar in Tripura’s Agartala.

According to the Government Railway Police (GRP), the two officers had allegedly got off the train prior to the discovery of the alleged crime in Jharkhand. The GRP had arrested a soldier, Manjrish Tripathi, on the day the incident had taken place (December 27). Tripathi was remanded to seven days of police custody on Tuesday.

Tripathi, a resident of Sultanpur in Uttar Pradesh, had allegedly forced the Class IX student to consume liquor when she had reportedly ran away from her home to travel to Ludhiana to meet a Facebook friend, police said.

Shortly she had been forced into consuming the alcohol, the two BSF men had allegedly gangraped her.

The girl, a resident of Kolkata’s Dum Dum area, was rescued by personnel of the RPF and GRP from Jharkhand’s Madhupur station on Monday.