Kolkata: Top Maoist leader Kishenji has
sustained bullet injuries in an encounter, the Maoists claimed
today but the West Bengal police said it has no information
and suspects that it may be a ploy to divert attention.
While there has been speculation in the media that
Kishenji, who has been eluding arrest for several years,
has been injured recently, the Maoists spoke about it for the
first time in an e-mail to Orissa Chief Minister Naveen
Patnaik.
According to reports, 55-year-old Kishenji was seriously
injured during a seven-hour-long gunbattle between security
forces and the rebels and was undergoing treatment by local
quacks at a rebel hideout.
The e-mail sent to the Orissa chief minister`s office in
Bhubaneshwar threatened to blow up the residence of Patnaik
and other important establishments as a retaliation to each
bullet that hit Kishenji.
"We will reply to each bullet hitting at Kishenji and
comrade Bikram," said the e-mail which was received yesterday
and purportedly sent by the Central Military Commission of the
Peoples` Liberation Guerrilla Army, a Maoist outfit.
"As soon as you launch joint special operation or `Green
Hunt`, we will start attacks at Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and
Puri simultaneously," the e-mail said.
"We still don`t have any information about injury to
Kishenji or Bikram and so I cannot tell anything about this,"
West Midnapore superintendent of police Manoj Verma told PTI.
He said this could be a ploy by the Maoists to divert
attention of the police from the operation against them on
Bengal-Jharkhand border so that they get time to regroup and
prepare for a bigger assault.
"They have done it before and so this is not a new thing
for them," Verma said.
Known as Kishenji, Koteswar Rao hailed from Telangana
region of Andhra Pradesh where he was studying law but decided
to drop out and later was in the forefront of operations
launched by CPI(Maoists).
PTI
