Quick Response Team

Narmadakka

Kirandada

Telangana

Maoists

More than a month after an improvised explosive device (IED) blast killed 15 personnel of theand a private vehicle’s driver in Gadchiroli, police have arrested two senior operatives of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist): Uppuganti Nirmalakumari (58) aliasand her husband Satyanarayana (70) alias. The two had allegedly played “major roles” in planning the attack, a Gadchiroli police source said.Narmadakka and Satyanarayana, who are both senior members of CPI (Maoist)’s ‘Dandakaranya Special Zone Committee’, were intercepted by the police, which coordinated its operation with thepolice, near a bus-stop at Sironcha in Gadchiroli district on Monday. They were placed under arrest on Tuesday evening, the sources said. Gadchiroli and Telangana police were tracking the movements of the couple over the last several days and had information that they would enter Gadchiroli from Telangana.“The information was that Narmadakka, who is afflicted with cancer, was in Telangana for treatment and the couple would later enter Gadchiroli,” said a source.“The arrests of Narmadakka and her husband Kiran are significant and they are being interrogated about their roles in the conspiracy related to the May 1 IED attack and about the roles of other accused,” Maharashtra police’s Additional Director General of Police (Special Operations) Rajender Singh told Mumbai Mirror. According to another police officer, Narmadakka is named as an accused in 65 cases of “serious offences” across several police stations in Gadchiroli. “She has allegedly been an accused in several attacks against policemen that thestaged in the past,” he said.“Kirandada, on the other hand, is the Team Leader of the publication team of the Dandakaranya Zone of the Maoists and heads the group that brings out their monthly journal, Prabhat,” the officer said.On May 1, the IED, which was planted inside a culvert on a road connecting Kurkheda and Purada, went off at around 12:30 pm on a road stretch at Jambhulkheda, killing the 15 personnel of Gadchiroli police’s QRT, along with the driver of a private vehicle they were travelling in. According to sources, the blast was allegedly a part of the ‘bait-and-ambush’ tactic employed by Maoists, seen in the past in other extremism-affected parts of the country, including Chhattisgarh, Odisha and the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh. In this case, the bait was staged at Dadapur village, around 10 hours before the blast, when dozens of Maoists set ablaze 27 vehicles and machines belonging to a construction contractor. “It was meant to create an emergency for which reinforcements were expected to be sent from Kurkheda to Purada in haste, and in violation of standard operating procedure,” said a source. As the Maoists had anticipated, the QRT men were dispatched as reinforcement after the arson incident, the source said.The police suspect that Narmadakka could have been present in Gadchiroli to allegedly orchestrate the attack. “The two arrests have for now been made in the Dadapur arson attack case. It is suspected that Narmadakka was part of the arson attack,” the police source said. “We will verify with the help of witnesses if Narmadakka was seen in Dadapur the night before the IED blast.”It is suspected that the perpetrators of the attack had precise information about the movement of the QRT personnel and their vehicle, especially since the latter were in uniform, the source said. According to the Gadchiroli police’s FIR, operatives of four Maoists combat units – Company No 4, Tipagad Dalam (squad), Korchi Dalam and Vistar Platoon Dalam No 1 – were allegedly part of the conspiracy.A sub-divisional police officer, who had sent the QRT men as reinforcement, was shunted out in a “departmental action” for his alleged non-observance of the SOP, which included not having sent a road-opening party.