Maoist rebels may soon run out of improvised explosive devices (IED), particularly in Chhattisgarh and West Bengal where they are engaged in an open war with security forces.
Kolkata police on Thursday in collaboration with the Andhra Pradesh cops and Greyhound commandos struck a deadly blow to the supply chain of the guerrillas across the country. Sadanala Ramakrishna, a senior member of the erstwhile People’s War Group, also known as “Techie Anna” among the tribals of Adilabad and police force in the state, was sent custody to 24 hours after his detention by the Kolkata police.
In a swift move to choke the supply of weapons and IEDs to the Maoists in different states, the police busted well-organised weapon-making units in Kolkata and Mumbai on Thursday. This resembles the police raids on rocket launcher manufacturing units in Chennai and forests villages of Guntur in 2006 which ended in unearthing huge stocks of rocket launchers.
Maoist cadres were using these workshops, in central locations of Kolkata, Chennai, Nagpur, Raipur, Patna, Kharagpur, Bangalore, Pune and Mumbai, to fabricate rocket launchers, pressure-activated mines and hand grenades. The Kolkata and Mumbai raids led to seizure of bags full of parts of these weapons and IEDs, in addition to the arrest of nine senior Maoist cadres, including Ramakrishna, a senior leader, who is a contemporary of Maoist chief Muppala Laxmana Rao alias Ganapathi.
Ramakrishna, informed sources said, was in charge of the central technical committee, which is given the responsibility of fabricating weapons and explosives. The committee consists of five or six members and works under the direct supervision of the central military commission of the Maoist party. Ramakrishna operated with a corpus of Rs 200 crore every year to procure weapons, arrange drop houses, supply of ammunition and also manufacture of basic warfare equipment like bullet proof vests, bullets for SLRs, claymore mines , and finally high intensity IEDs.
Ramakrishna was found to have used the aliases of Santosh, Vinod, Bhanu and Kasturi. Hailing from Antakkapet village in the Karimnagar district of Andhra Pradesh. He did his BTech in Mechanical Engineering from the Regional Engineering College (later named the National Institute of Technology) in Warangal in 1976. He went underground some time around 1978. AP police sources said the Maoist technical team was getting raw materials for making rocket launchers and mines from north-eastern states, Odisha and Bihar.
The workshops were being used to fabricate the parts which were then transported to Chhattisgarh, where they were assembled to make weapons. Armed with information of different consignments of spare parts being transported to Chhattisgarh, police teams have been checking records of various transport companies in Raipur.