Bengaluru: A fake plan to get him safe passage to Sri Lanka for cataract treatment was what lured slain forest brigand Veerappan out of his safe spots in the Mudumalai forests into an 'ambulance' decoy of the police, says former chief of the Special Task Force K Vijay Kumar who has now come out with a tell-all book Veerappan: Chasing the Brigand.
If he had, indeed, escaped to Lanka, Veerappan hoped to come back with good eyesight and better equipped to resume sandalwood smuggling and poaching.
Saravanan, the constable who drove that ambulance, is now a sub-inspector. He was armed and accompanied by another officer, SI Velladurai, who had recently joined the team and was chosen for this operation as his face was little-known.
And above all, Saravanan was deeply conscious of how this was, literally, a do-or-die situation, considering how many policemen had earlier been killed by Veerappan. "I was told not to talk to him at all. Not a single word. I drove to the pre-decided point, waited for the cargo as we called it and drove out by the route decided," he said.
Recalling that nothing shakes a commander of a force like the STF than seeing bodies of his men being brought out repeatedly, Kumar recounted that the STF often used caricatures of the bandit as their target boards during shooting practice.
The bandit, who continues to capture the imagination of many in the region, was easily one of the most-feared ones in the country, with hundreds of crores having been spent by successive governments on the manhunt launched to find him. Veerappan had kept the police forces of three states on their toes, having killed nearly over 180 people — at least half of them police and forest officials.
Bidari is credited with decimating Veerappan's gang from 300-plus to merely a handful in the mid-90s.
"The crux of how we got Veerappan to believe our decoys, and how he came out — that hasn't been told," agrees Kannan.
Comments
0 comment