A member of the Bihar Jharkhand North Chhattisgarh Special Area Committee of the CPI (Maoists), arrested in a joint operation by the Jharkhand and Bihar police on May 29 from a hotel in Muzaffarpur in Bihar, has confessed to his role in stitching a bomb inside the body of a Central Reserve Police Force jawan, who was killed in an encounter with Maoists at Katiya village in Jharkhand’s Latehar district on January 7, police said.
Anup Thakur alias Subhash Thakur alias Tarun, a member of the Military Commission of the People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army (PLGA) admitted to have undergone training for this job with the Maoist cadre from Andhra Pradesh, said police sources.
The Military Commission, which was led by Arvind ji at the time of the encounter, aimed to target helicopters used for lifting injured CRPF jawans’ bodies. Thakur is alleged to have made the confession to a team of the Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh police that interrogated him in Jharkhand.
Eleven security personnel were killed in the two day-encounter between the PLGA and the CRPF. The bodies of four policemen were retrieved two days later. Four villagers, including a minor, were killed when an improvised explosive device (IED) went off when they lifted the body of Baijnath Kisku of the CRPF’s 112 Battalion on January 9 on the police’s instructions.
Two days later, an IED, consisting of gelatin sticks, a detonator and a battery in a container, was found inside the body of the other jawan, Babulal Patel, and defused. While doing autopsy in Ranchi, doctors noticed fresh stitches on Patel’s abdomen and alerted the police.
Thakur was brought back to Latehar from Muzaffarpur.
“Based on information extracted from Thakur, we recovered two .303 rifles, two locally made rifles,two Under Barrel Grenade Launcher and 110 bullets from the Pathki forest in Manika,” said Latehar Superintendent of Police Michael S. Raj.
Thakur also confessed to his role in 24 incidents of Maoist violence.
