ATS sums up ‘Naxal’ tutor: Gujarat to MP to city,under various names

Before arriving in Mumbai,Prabhakar allegedly worked in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. ATS officers said they have seized an election identity card and a Central Railway season ticket identification card,both with his photographs,but with the name “Bharat Raman Gandhi”. They said Prabhakar,who has worked as a translator,a tutor and even a cyber café manager,is fluent in five languages.

The alleged member of the People’s War Group (PWG) and the CPI (Maoist) was on Wednesday remanded to police custody till January 28. He was booked under Sections 15,18,23 and 23 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for militancy and insurgency-related violence.

Prabhakar is wanted in four cases in Gadchiroli. ATS chief K P Raghuvanshi said,“He was wanted for some time now. We were working along with the Andhra Pradesh Police on his movements.”

The ATS has allegedly seized documents dated November 2009,with photographs of exercises by armed men and of recent Naxal ambushes. “He initially stressed he has left these organisations,but finally started opening up. He says his area of operation in Gujarat was in the tribal belt and his focus was the unorganised sector including powerloom workers and the diamond sector,” said an official.

The sixth floor tenement in a Kanjurmarg building,where he lived most recently,houses families displaced by a major road project. The house belongs to a young Maharashtrian man,M Pandit,who he met in a Jogeshwari library they both frequented. The Pandits were away at work on Wednesday. A neighbour said,“They gave this old man accommodation because he did not have a place to stay. He stayed in the house in the day as a paying guest.”

He interacted with no one,the door was always shut,and few knew there was anyone indoors during the day. “We didn’t know his real name was Prabhakar,he said his name was Manoj,” said Pandit’s wife on the phone.

The ATS is probing if his choice of residence — Dahisar,Mankhurd and Jogeshwari before Kanjurmarg — was part of a plan to reach out to a section of Mumbaiites without access to better housing and infrastructure. He lived in five locations in the city,all with people he is not related to and using different identities,ATS sources said.

They said Prabhakar operated through a newly floated subsidiary group of the PWG,the People’s Guerrilla Army (PGA) formed in December 2000 as the fighting force of the PWG. “He has said he had given his resignation to Anuradha Ghandy,wife of Kobad Ghandy. As Anuradha is dead,there is no way to verify this,” said an official.