In a crucial development related to the Kerala Forest Department’s hunt for the poachers who had allegedly killed as many as 28 elephants in the State’s forests in the past one-and-a-half years for ivory, the prime accused in the case was found dead in a farm in Dodamarg, Maharashtra.
The body of Aikaramattam Vasu (52) of Kuttampuzha, Kothamangalam in Ernakulam district was on Saturday night found hanging from a tree in a farm in Dodamarg leased by a native of Muvattupuzha in Kerala for pineapple cultivation, as per reports. The police had issued a lookout notice for Vasu.
A note found from near the body, presumably written by Vasu, said he had decided to commit suicide because of the case over which Forest Department was on a hunt for him. The letter said that his relatives were innocent. Vasu’s sister Ambika, her husband lakshmanan and another woman, Sheeja, had been arrested the other day in connection with the case.
As per information received by the Forest Department, a poacher gang in which Vasu was the shooter, had hunted down over 25 elephants within a few months and had extracted the ivory. A case was registered in this regard last month. The department thinks that the extracted tusks had been told to ivory traders based in Thiruvananthapuram.
It is said that the ivory, in the form of polished tusks and curios, were being smuggled into Nepal through Kolkata from Thiruvananthapuram and the department thinks that a strong mafia with a huge network was behind the racket. As many as 19 persons have already been arrested but reports say that all of them are low-level players.
As per reports, Vasu had started elephant-poaching at the age of 14 but only one case had been registered against him. The shocking information about the large-scale poaching by Vasu’s gang was passed on to the department by a former watcher, KD Kunjumon, who had accompanied the poachers’ gang to the jungles last year.
Manoj, lessee of the Dodamarg farm where the body was found, said that Vasu had approached him for job at the pineapple farm a month ago. “I had no idea about the case against him. The moment I learned about it from newspapers, I asked him to return. He promised me that he would return and surrender,” he said.
The Kerala Forest Department had made a mobilization of unprecedented scale within the State and outside to nab Vasu and other poachers. As many as 250 Forest guards divided into 20 squads and overseen by a Range Officer had combed three forest ranges in Kerala for two weeks for him and associates. Even Forest officials secretly admit that poaching has become widespread in the Kerala jungles recently after an interval of more than two decades.