The four Bihar policemen held hostage by Maoists were first disarmed and blindfolded and then taken to a camp where they were kept segregated and the killing of one of them was also not revealed to the other three captives.
The Maoists who kept the policeman in captivity in an undisclosed location in the jungles also hardly talked in front of the hostages and they mostly whispered and talked in “code language”, one of the released policemen said.
Three policemen who were abducted along with slain Bihar Military Police (BMP) assistant sub-inspector Lukas Tete at Lakhisarai district, 165 km from Patna, after a bloody encounter on August 29, were released on Monday without any physical harm. The encounter had left seven policemen dead.
Narrating the ordeal of the hostages to reporters at a police station in Lakhisarai shortly after being freed, BMP havildar Ehshan Khan said following their capture from the Kajra forests they were blindfolded and kept segregated at the camp.
“Initially, I was apprehensive about my fate and that of my fellow policemen, but the Maoists behaved well with us and assured us that no harm will be done to us,” the havildar, whose home is in Ranchi, said.
What Mr. Khan and sub-inspectors Rupesh Kumar and Abhay Prasad Yadav however did not know till Monday morning was that they were kept in the dark about Tete’s killing and that his body was dumped on a road on Friday last. The Maoists revealed the killing to them only in the morning.
The three men were ironically released in the same area where Tete’s bullet-ridden body was found.
“It saddened us and we prayed for peace of his soul,” Mr. Khan said.
He was, however, determined to carry on with police work despite the trauma his family went through during his captivity.
“I have resolved to carry on with my service as a duty-bound policeman,” he said.
Mr. Kumar said the Maoists did not talk in front of the captives. “They didn’t talk in front of us. They hardly talked and mostly whispered and talked in code language,” he added.
