| CURRENT ISSUE NOVEMBER 01, 2004 |
| COVER STORY: VEERAPPAN |
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| Death Of An Outlaw THE INSIDE STORY OF THE FINAL DAYS OF THE COUNTRY'S LARGEST, LONGEST AND COSTLIEST MANHUNT THAT FELLED INDIA'S MOST WANTED AND FEARED BANDIT | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Stephen David in Dharmapuri | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| After years of evading their dragnet, frustrated policemen had said in jest that the only thing that could ever catch up with Koose Muniswamy Veerappan was age. But with him turning 52 this year it would still be a long wait. Last week though, nemesis came to India's most wanted criminal in the form of a bullet through his forehead. He fell to a meticulously laid trap of the Special Task Force (STF) in a plan hatched in the past year. It was a grisly but fitting finale to the largest, longest and costliest manhunt ever launched by Indian police forces.
As his body lay on a stark stone slab in a hospital mortuary at Dharmapuri, Tamil Nadu, it was apparent that Veerappan dead was a far cry from the images that were flashed of him when the dreaded bandit was alive. Gone was his lush trademark moustache. In its place was a drooping remnant that in many ways symbolised his dwindling fortunes in recent years. Next to him lay the bodies of his three key gang members who had also been shot dead in the encounter on the road near Papparapatti, a hamlet 10 km south of Dharmapuri. Veerappan circa 2004 was a pale shadow of what he was four years ago. In July 2000, in his most daring abduction ever, he took as hostage Kannada matinee idol Rajkumar. He brought both the Karnataka and Tamil Nadu governments to their knees before releasing the filmstar after months in captivity. Karnataka DGP C. Dinakar even alleged that a ransom of Rs 20 crore had been paid to Veerappan by the office of the state chief minister S.M. Krishna.
In 2002, Veerappan followed that up by taking hostage H. Nagappa, a former Karnataka minister. He shocked the country by killing the politician when his demands were not met. It led Krishna to even compare the difficulty of hunting down Veerappan with that of Osama bin Laden. The reward money that the two states offered for the capture of Veerappan and his gang members was upped to Rs 5.5 crore. By then, his record of killings had mounted to an astounding 124 people. In his reign of 30 years in the dense tropical jungles at the confluence of the Western and Eastern Ghats in south India, he had killed over 200 elephants for their tusks. As the tusker population declined alarmingly because of his strike rate and ivory sale was banned, he began to strip the forests bare by hacking expensive sandalwood trees and selling them for a small fortune. At his peak in the early '90s, with 100 gang members, Veerappan ruled the southern jungles ruthlessly mowing down police officers and forest officials crossing his path. He had even developed a Robin Hood image by distributing some of his booty among village folk. In the pantheon of Indian dacoits, not even Malkhan Singh or Phoolan Devi earned the nationwide notoriety that Veerappan had. He had also gained a certain degree of political clout by buying influence with his money. It was part of the reason why he was able to successfully evade arrest for so long.
However, when K. Vijay Kumar took over as chief of the STF in October 2003, the bandit had lost much of his legendary skills. This was not the first time that Kumar, an additional director general of police, would be matching wits with Veerappan. Way back in 1993, when the outlaw was at his most destructive, Kumar spent many months tracking him down. Late last year when he took charge again, Kumar was careful to learn from his past mistakes. "The only way Veerappan was able to have his free writ running then was because of human intelligence and that is exactly what we applied to net the criminal," he told India Today soon after gunning down the bandit. So instead of simply a show of force, Kumar launched a covert operation codenamed Cocoon to infiltrate Veerappan's inner circle. He appointed his deputy Senthamarai Kannan, SP Intelligence, as head of the core team that would penetrate the hamlets and villages around Veerappan's operational areas. So team members posing as bus conductors, odd-job men and traders soon merged with the local people. Some STF men lived in disguise for weeks on end and were even able to mingle with Veerappan's gang members. They soon managed to ferret out critical information about the bandit's medical condition. He was known to be a chronic diabetic. But of late he was said to be suffering from eye problems. This had forced him to seek medical aid outside his jungle hideouts. The other eye too was clouding over with cataract. It provided the STF an opportunity to lure him out in the open. The STF team also found that the years of battling police forces had reduced the outlaw's gang to just three core members: Sethukuli Govindan, who was 40 years of age, Chandre Gowda, 35, and Sethumani, 35. There was dissidence too among the gang members that would prove of crucial help. There was a power struggle on between Govindan and Gowda. Of late, Govindan also nursed ambitions of taking over the mantle from Veerappan. So desperate was the bandit to expand his team that he had decided to recruit some men from the splinter groups of Tamil extremist organisations like the Tamil Nadu Liberation Army (TNLA).
The other key pitfall Kumar avoided was to run into conflict with his Karnataka counterparts in the STF. Although it was meant to be a joint force they rarely shared intelligence which allowed Veerappan to successfully stay out of reach. If he found the Tamil Nadu STF closing in on him, he would slip into Karnataka. This time around the two teams decided to act as one. Karnataka STF chief Jyoti Prakash Mirji told India Today: "We did not operate as Karnataka or Tamil Nadu STF. We did not even have a language problem as we were focused on ending the Veerappan menace."
The STF team had learnt that Veerappan knew the 6,000 sq km of jungle in which he operated better than anyone. So they evolved a plan to draw him out of his lair. The strategy was to inundate with troops the Veerappan-dominated areas in the Sathyamangalam (Tamil Nadu) and Kollegal (Karnataka) forests. It forced Veerappan and his gang to move out from denser jungle to sparser ones where information about his movements was more easily gathered. They then set the trap for him. They knew Veerappan needed medical treatment for his right eye desperately. By then they had an STF man in contact with the core gang members who offered to arrange an ambulance for their leader to travel incognito for treatment. The date was fixed for either Monday, October 18 or Wednesday, October 20 (Veerappan liked to travel only on Mondays or Wednesdays). On October 18, at around 10 p.m., after ascertaining from aides that the driver was trustworthy, Veerappan agreed to board the ambulance somewhere near the Dharmapuri jungles. Dressed in white, he is said to have trimmed his moustache to avoid easy identification. Apart from carrying Rs 3.5 lakh in cash, the gang was armed with two AK-47 rifles, a 7.63 self-loading rifle and hand grenades.
The ambulance, a white tempo traveller bearing the name, S.K.S. Hospital, Salem was being driven by an STF constable in disguise. Kumar decided to waylay the ambulance on a lonely stretch of road near Papparapatti village, about 8 km from Dharmapuri. A truck with 20 STF men in civilian clothes was parked on the road. About 10 m behind was a matador van with 10 STF personnel.
When the ambulance arrived on the spot, the STF driver stopped and fled. Kumar twice used a megaphone to tell the bandits to surrender. But Veerappan and his gang opened fire. The STF men hit back by lobbying a grenade inside the ambulance and then opened fire, killing all four of them. It is not clear whether Veerappan fell to STF bullets or shot himself. Doubts are also being raised about the details of the encounter. Just how big the kill was became evident the next day when 20,000 people lined up on the main road in front of the General Hospital at Dharmapuri to catch a glimpse of the notorious smuggler. Veerappan's wife Muthulakshmi claimed the body. Instead of cremation, the police ordered that it be buried at Moolakadu near Mettur. They could always exhume the body in case there was a controversy over his identity or the way he died. The Tamil Nadu STF personnel were rewarded handsomely by delighted Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa. She announced promotions for each of them apart from a Rs 3 lakh cash award and a plot of land at their hometowns. With the elimination of the rest of his gang members, the Veerappan saga appears to have come to an end. It even forced Bollywood filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma, who was producing a film called Let's Catch Veerappan, to change the movie's title. Several mysteries though remain unsolved. A probe is possibly needed into his political connections and the nexus that had helped him stay alive for so long. There is also the puzzle of where Veerappan stashed away his booty of over Rs 10 crore. Police suspect that he has buried wads of currency notes at his various hideouts in the jungles. It may trigger another unprecedented hunt-this time for the treasure left behind by India's most notorious criminal. -With Arun Ram
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1980s: Switched to sandalwood smuggling after India imposed ban on ivory trade and he was reduced to penury. Soon became king of sandalwood smuggling in the South.
MALKHAN SINGH: The king of the Chambal ravines had 113 cases against him, 17 involving murder. He surrendered in 1982 and served out his term. He contested the Madhya Pradesh assembly polls in 2003.
PHOOLAN DEVI: She hit the headlines when her gang killed 20 Thakurs in UP. She surrendered in 1983 and was released in 1994. She was elected an MP and gunned down in 2001.
MOHAR AND MADHO SINGH: Mohar Singh (left), who was accused of gunning down 115 people in the Chambal region, later became a municipal chairman. Madho Singh was accused of committing 71 murders.
Veerappan began as a wildlife horror story, and for two decades, reigned in the forest as India's most elusive fugitive, and as the biggest embarrassment of the state. Brigand. Poacher. Kidnapper. The hunter. The hunted. The killer who couldn't distinguish between man and beast, he was the last savage of the jungle book. That was the written wisdom of the media as he became a recurring banality of the front pages-and a subplot of southern politics, never failing to magnify the enormity of crime and comedy. As the states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu-never happy neighbours-failed again and again, Veerappan grew larger than his crime. He became the haunting spirit of the forest, always felt but never seen, and the victim states-the vanished film star, the massacred policemen-looked more and more ridiculous. 