By Sujeet Kumar, IANS
Raipur : The arrest of two senior female Maoist guerrillas has helped the police in Chhattisgarh to unearth a plot aimed at killing political leaders in the state, police sources said Wednesday.
The authorities have drawn the conclusion following the seizure of documents and maps from a Maoist hideout in the state capital.
A police source told IANS that a map of Raipur city, with red colour markings, and of several politicians’ houses, including that of Chief Minister Raman Singh, indicated that they were intended to be targets of the Maoists.
The police found Maoist literature at the Raipur house.
“The raid has stunned us. We found a diary and notes with names and details of dozens of so-called intellectuals… We never thought that the Maoists had such wide contacts in Raipur and other cities,” the source said.
The two women were among four people arrested Tuesday and have been identified as Malti Usendi and Meena.
This followed the busting of a hideout in Raipur’s Dangania area Monday night where the police took in their possession 91 home made pistols and 26 foreign-made wireless sets. These had been stored in eight bags.
The source said that the women’s arrests had exposed the Maoist urban contacts in Raipur and the nearby city of Bhilai as well as other urban pockets.
The arrested women were allegedly acting as Maoist couriers and receiving arms coming in from various locations and passing them on to insurgents, said a police official who did not want to be named.
Malti, 28, is the wife of Gudsa Usendi, spokesman of the banned Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist). Meena, also 28, is a zonal-level Maoist leader.
Police also arrested Raipur-based Prafulla Jha, 60, who was described as a freelance journalist, and his son-in-law Vinod Chandrakar for their alleged links to the seized arms.
Gudsa Usendi issues statements on behalf of the outfit’s Dandkaranya Special Zonal Committee, which runs a de facto parallel government in the vast forested, mineral-rich interior areas of Bastar.