Naxals plant IED in jawan’s belly

Deeptiman Tiwary & Alok K N Mishra TNN

New Delhi/Ranchi: Maoists, who implanted a tumour-sized bomb in the body of a slain CRPF jawan in Jharkhand, might not have seen Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar winning film Hurt Locker, but the similarities are uncanny. The audacious tactic poses a deadly challenge to anti-Naxal operations.
    The embedding of a 2.75-kg improvised explosive device (IED) in the jawan’s body, probably aimed at blowing up the hospital where the jawan’s autopsy was to be conducted, replicates a chilling moment from the 2008 film.
    In the film, the madness of war comes home to a bomb disposal expert, played by Jeremy Renner, when during a raid on a warehouse he discovers the body of a football-loving Iraqi boy nicknamed “Beckham”. He finds the body on a table in the process of being made into a bomb.
    The circuitry of the IED planted in the jawan, killed during an anti-Naxal operation that turned into an ambush in Jharkhand’s Latehar area, was wired to trigger a blast as soon as doctors performing the postmortem opened the abdomen.
    Dr Binay Kumar of Ranchi Institute of Medical Sciences’ said: “Apart from the IED, detonator batteries and a small solar panel were extracted from the abdomen.” He said the jawan had received several bullet injuries. “The IED weighed 2.75 kg with its container,” Kumar, who conducted the autopsy, said.
    Over 20 bomb disposal squad members took more than four hours to defuse the bomb. Constable Babulal Patel of CRPF’s 112 battalion hailed from the Nababganj locality in Allahabad.
    This was the second surprise Naxals served up after recently planting a bomb beneath the body of another dead CRPF jawan.That was a lift from another Oscar winning film No Man’s Land in which an injured soldier becomes a living booby trap. That mine had exploded the moment a CRPF search party, including local villagers, shifted the body killing three villagers.
    Whether inspired by these classics on the Iraq and Bosnia conflicts or just a product of indigenous cunning, the ingenious Maoist tactics show that security forces need to face up to a determined enemy that might have taken a few hard blows but will find new ways to strike back. CRPF, local police raid plans leaked
New Delhi/ Latehar: The Latehar operation was a setback to the CRPF and local police as plans were leaked and a raid turned into a deadly ambush. In recent months, Maoists haven’t indulged in big, sensational strikes on civilian or armed establishments, choosing to target “informers” selectively.
    Still, the Jharkhand operation was a rare showdown. While the security forces took casualties, they inflicted some on the Maoists as well. The bullet-riddled body of Babulal Patel, 29, was found on Wednesday evening a few metres away from the site of explosion. “At that time itself we found it suspicious as we saw that his abdomen had been cut open horizontally and then stitched back,” a senior CRPF official said. The body was taken to Ranchi the same evening where it was put through an Xray revealing the bomb even as doctors refused to conduct the post-mortem. A bomb squad took about an hour to defuse the bomb. “It had to be done carefully as any pressure could make the bomb explode. The stitches were opened with awater gun which exposed the bomb kept in a plastic container and wrapped in polythene. Its power supply was cut using claws,” said an official.
    The gelatin stick bomb was checked again to ensure it was not fitted with a backup circuit. Help from NSG was sought over the phone, said sources. An analysis of the operation that began on Monday morning with an encounter between 300 CRPF men and a large group of Maoists in Karmatiya forests has revealed that information on the movement of troops was leaked and the Maoists were waiting atop hills to ambush the forces.
    CRPF managed to prevent a repeat of the massacre at Chintalnar in Chhattisgarh where 76 personnel were killed. “The village is behind an 18-km-long ridge while there are plains around it. To prevent a Chintalnar, while one contingent moved towards the plains, another started scaling the hills. It was this contingent that was fired upon leading to five deaths,” an official said.