Zeenews Bureau
Hyderabad: The CPI (Maoist) is trying to
regain the lost ground in Andhra Pradesh and inputs indicate
that the Maoist Action Teams are planning to commit
sensational offences, a top police officer said here today.
"Maoists in order to prove their existence want to commit
some sensational offences and create terror in the minds of
common people. Inputs suggest that Maoist action teams are
roaming in the state trying to re-build the organisation,"
Andhra Pradesh DGP R R Girish Kumar told reporters here.
Two days after police recovered huge cache of arms and ammunition from a Maoist dump, Kumar told media persons here that the guerrillas were planning major strikes and some "action teams" were moving to different places for the purpose.
Alarmed over the seizure of spare parts sufficient to make 3,000 hand grenades and rocket launchers from a peaceful village in coastal Andhra, the police chief appealed to people to alert police about any movement of Maoists or their arms and ammunition caches.
He displayed before media the huge stockpiles of arms and ammunitions recovered from a house in Paidiparru village near Tanuku mandal in West Godavari district Saturday.
The material, in 26 gunny bags, included spare parts like springs, pins and tubes used for making hand grenades, tube launchers used to assemble rocket launchers, parts used for land mines and 26 rounds of 9mm pistol ammunition.
The dump was recovered a day after the killing of a top Maoist, S. Kondal Reddy, by the police in Warangal district. Popular as "Tech Ramna" among Maoists, he was proficient in technical matters and had taken the house on rent for storing arms and ammunition.
The police chief said if used, the material could have caused huge loss of life. "These are deadly weapons meant for liquidating the police and security personnel as well as the common man. Imagine what they could have done with this huge arms stockpile," he said.
Police claimed that Maoists were collecting the material for last two to three years from different places in preparation for major attacks.
He was speaking to media persons in the backdrop of
killing of two top Maoists leaders, Shakamuri Apparao and
Kondala Reddy in encounter on March 12.
Maoists are now making use of peaceful areas to store
their arms and carry out extremist activities, the DGP
said adding they were investigating if such type of activities
were taking place in other parts of the state as well.
The officer requested the public to be vigilant about
the activities of such groups and inform the police if they
come across any such activities of Maoists or on any storage
of arms and ammunition in their respective villages or towns.
Girish Kumar termed as "baseless" the allegations made
by Civil Rights activists who said the two leaders were killed
by police in the name of encounters. "These are allegations
made without any evidence in support there of... they are
baseless," he asserted.
-Agencies’ inputs
First Published: Monday, March 15, 2010, 22:11