Police have tightened the security for the top leaders of ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti in view of the threat of the outlawed CPI Maoist to target them to take revenge of Friday’s killing of 10 ultras on Chhattisgarh border. The Maoists have threatened to intensify their attacks on TRS leaders including the Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao.
Ten Maoists including 7 women and 1 junior commando of elite Greyhound force were killed in the incident in the wee hours of yesterday.
The threat was issued in a letter purportedly written by Jagan, the spokesperson of the Telangana CPI Maoist state spokesperson. Significantly he denied that the Telangana state Committee secretary Hari Bhushan and another senior leader were among those killed in the encounter and said that the police officials were making false statements to demoralize the cadre. “Comrade Hari Bhushan, Bade Chokka Rao alias Damodar and K Raji Reddy did not die in the encounter as the police was falsely propagating”, the letter said. Only two persons district committee member D Swamy of Hanmakonda and Ratna were from Telangana and all others were from Dantewada and Sukma districts of Chhattisgarh, he said.
Directly targeting the Chief Minister K Chandrsekhar Rao the letter said that he was conducting the fake encounters to facilitate giving water and land to the corporate companies. They also held the Chattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh also responsible for the encounters can called him a “Hindutva leader” and said that the two Chief Ministers were working to displace the tribal people from their lands.
It was a case of one sided firing by the police and some traitor had tipped off the police about the presence of the Maoists, Jagan said in the letter.
It is first time since the formation of Telangana state and TRS coming to power that the party has faced such a direct and serious threat from the Maoists.
The letter came even as the police was in the process of identifying the dead. The bodies of the slain Maoists were shifted in a helicopter to the government hospital at Bhadrachalam for postmortem.
The superintendent of police of Bhadradari-Kottagudem district of Telangana Amber Kishore said that the Supreme Court guidelines were being followed in performing postmortem by the forensic experts.
The team of forensic experts from Mahatma Gandhi Hospital, Warangal reached Bhadrachalam today and they performed the postmortem. On a petition filed by the state Civil liberties Committee the Hyderabad High Court ordered that the postmortem should be videographed.
Though the identity of the dead was yet to be disclosed by the police it was believed that women include a doctor Reni from Bastar who had joined the Maoists recently.
Other women Aitu, Kosi, Kamala, Indrvathi, Sukki and Somi also belong to Chhattisgarh, sources said. Two more were identified as Mallesh and district committee member D Swamy alias Prabhakar from Hanmakonda in Telangana. Prabhakar, a bachelor of education degree holder, was under ground for the last 14 years.
Meanwhile the director general of police M Mahinder Reddy, Inspector General, Intelligence Naveen Chand and other senior officials attended the funeral of Greyhound commando Sushil Kumar’s funeral in Bidar in neighboring Karnataka today. They laid wreath on his body and he was cremated with the state honor.
Sushil Kumar was killed in the encounter with the Maoists yesterday and his body was airlifted in a helicopter to Bidar. He had joined the Greyhound force in 2014.