Bihar encounter: ‘Maoists had planted IEDs on trees near camp’

According to a senior CRPF official, when the security personnel searched the area after the encounter, they found several IEDs hung on trees near the Maoist camp.

“They were like claymore mines with remote control triggering mechanism. The idea, it seems, was to explode them when security forces came under those trees. This method can cause heavy casualties as the impact is right on the head. In remote jungles where evacuation is a time-taking process, serious head injuries are certain to lead to deaths,” the officer said.

He added that since the Maoists were taken by surprise and the CRPF team took good positions, the rebels could not trigger the IEDs.

They did, however, trigger the IEDs lined up on tracks generally used for walking. It was in this series of blasts that a bunch of CRPF men were caught in and died.

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CRPF DG K Durga Prasad maintained that the operation was based on pin-pointed intelligence and there was no violation of standard operating procedure. “The men took all possible precautions. They did not take walking tracks. They reached the encounter site climbing up hills,” he told The Indian Express.

CRPF sources said a 70-strong team of CRPF, state police and the elite CoBRA commandos launched the operation on July 16. They reached the encounter site near Dumri nala on Aurangabad-Gaya border by Monday noon. When they reached the Maoist camp and engaged them, the latter triggered IEDs lined on walking tracks. “At that time, the last party of the unit had come down from a hill and was climbing another to reach the encounter site. This party got caught in the small strip of land lined with IEDs. Nine of our men died here,” said an officer.

Another CRPF personnel died in a gunbattle with the Maoists at their camp.

“A bullet ricocheted off a boulder and hit him in the back. The men were on a slope. He didn’t realise initially and kept firing. Slowly, he began to lose strength. That’s when he realised that he had been hit,” the officer said.

Search of the site after the encounter led to the recovery of over 750 IEDs. “As many as 350 exploded on the small stretch that killed nine of our CoBRA commandos,” the officer said.

Security officers said the operation was launched to nab top Maoist leaders, including Sandeep Yadav, a CPI (Maoist) central committee member facing over 80 cases in Bihar and Jharkhand. “The recovery of AK 47 and Insas rifles shows that top Maoists were present there. We recovered bodies of three Maoists and also saw blood at many spots. This confirms that more than three Maoists died or were injured but their bodies were taken away by the others,” a senior CRPF officer said.