Maoist carrying Rs Rs 25L bounty held in forested area of H’bag

Hazaribag: The Hazaribag police arrested a member of the CPI (Maoist) who carried a reward of Rs 25 lakh on his head and was wanted in 90 cases registered across various police stations in the state and in Bihar, police said on Friday. The arrest was made on Thursday in Kothabukar hillock under Chouparan police station limits after the cops received a tip about his whereabouts.
The rebel was identified as Pradyuman Sharma (49). He was the outfit’s eastern regional bureau member and a member of the Magadh zone of the Maoists’ Bihar Jharkhand Special Area Committee (BJSAC).
A graduate in philosophy who hailed from Rustampur village in Jehanabad district of Bihar, Sharma joined the outlawed outfit in 1996 and went by aliases such as Saket, Lulah and Kundan.
Hazaribag SP Manoj Ranjan Chouthey, while terming Sharma’s arrest as a prized catch, said, “He was a part of the think tank of the outlawed outfit and was the brain behind extorting huge amounts of money from under construction railway projects and civil projects under the public works department in the area.”
As soon as the cops got to know that Sharma has arrived in the forests of Chouparan on the intervening night of Wednesday and Thursday, a team was put together at the command of ASP (operation) Nigam Prasad and Ajit Kumar, who is the deputy commandant of the 22nd battalion of CRPF. The two officers made their way into the forests with their teams on Thursday night and found two men talking at the hillock. As soon the cops steeped closer towards the duo, latter saw them and one of the men escaped while the other was nabbed, who was later identified as Sharma. “Sharma’s identity was confirmed by his disfigured hand, which he had sustained in an IED blast,” Chouthey said.
Sharma, during his interrogation, said that he was mostly active in the Magadh zone of Bihar and Jharkhand since he joined the Maoists. Being a BJSAC member, Sharma was also responsible for strengthening the Maoist organization in the region.