The State police are in touch with their counterparts in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to launch an extended jungle operation to deny an armed group, suspected to be Maoists, safe haven in the northern forests of Kerala.
Senior officials told The Hindu here on Sunday that the Home Department had requested the Centre to allocate, at the earliest, at least three companies of the Central Reserve Police Force’s Commando Battalion for Resolute Action (COBRA), a special forces unit experienced in counter-insurgency operations in diverse forest terrains, for the proposed joint operation.
The intelligence wing has reported to the government that the armed group was sighted at least 16 times this year in the State’s deep forests contiguous with Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, including Nilambur.
In January, when the first report of the presence of an estimated 32-member “armed group” trickled out, the unit upped its intelligence resources among forest-dwellers and those living on the fringes of the forests.
The most “alarming yield of information” came on February 17 when the unit’s field operatives reported the sighting of two armed “suspected Maoists,” both of them in military uniform and cradling AK-47 assault rifles, in the Munderi forests in the Pothukal police station limits in Malappuram.
Soon the police intelligence learned of “sightings” of a six-member armed group in Mankundy Hill, about 3.5 km from the Karnataka border in the Peringome police station limits and another 12-member armed group in the Urupumkutti forests in the Karikotta police station limits in Kannur.
They got reports of its members, including three women, frequently seeking medical aid and provisions from remote public health centres and tribal settlements.
The police consulted experts from the Centre for Earth Science Studies who told them that the vast cave formations under the thick canopy of the evergreen forests of the Western Ghats could provide shelter to large groups of people.
Officials said the dense forest cover and the monsoon had rendered the prospect of aerial surveillance, including the use of unmanned aerial vehicles of the Research and Analysis Wing, impossible.
The police are of the view that only having “boots on the ground” will help rid the forests of such armed elements. Their policy is not to engage or neutralise such groups but to prevent them from getting entrenched here and fortifying their positions with lethal landmines as is the practice of Maoists in other regions of the country.
