By Sujeet Kumar, IANS
Raipur : Do Maoist guerrillas have access to helicopters? The question is being seriously debated in police circles here after unconfirmed intelligence reports that top Maoist leaders have been using helicopters to travel from their strongholds in Orissa and Jharkhand to Chhattisgarh.
“We have information that Maoist top gun Ganapathi used a chopper in April 2005 to attend a meeting at short notice in Chhattisgarh’s Abujhmad forest, an area protected by landmines all around,” said a senior police officer based at the police headquarters here.
“The area has several war training centres and explosive units. If the sources are to be believed, the chopper took off from a remote location in Orissa’s Malkangiri district,” the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told IANS.
Thereafter, on at least two more occasions, Ganapathi travelled by a chopper from the Abujhmad Maoist base to the forested rebel hideouts in Jharkhand’s Garhwa district.
“It is certain that Maoists have managed choppers somehow to ferry their top leaders for crunch meetings. They can also use the choppers to move out from their bases quickly if police attack them,” the officer further said.
Information on availability of choppers to the ultra-left radicals need to be checked and verified further, he said.
The Abujhmad forest is spread out over a 4,000 sq km stretch in Bastar in Chhattisgarh’s southern region. Police claim rebels have set up several explosives and war-training units in the jungles of Bastar to run a terror network that touches 13 Indian states.
Counter terrorism expert B.K. Ponwar, director of the Counter Terrorism and Jungle Warfare College (CTJWC) in Bastar’s Kanker district, said: “It is easy to use a chopper. Maoists may be using it to get away from one location to another but the question is about its availability. How can they manage a chopper?”
“Since a chopper needs a very small open area to land, it’s possible for the rebels to use it,” Ponwar told IANS.
However, Vishwaranjan, who took charge as director general of police of Chhattisgarh in July this year, discounted the possibility of Maoists using a chopper for their movement.
“So far, they (Maoists) don’t have such technical capabilities. Moreover, they can’t take such security risks, as their movements would be exposed. Choppers can be brought down because it would be easier to know in which direction they are moving,” Vishwaranjan told IANS.