These photos throw light on the kind of life Veerapan leads in his forest hideout...»
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I was there then to meet Assistant Conservator of Forests Vijaykumar Gogi. It was late May 1992 - the first day of my task to report on the bandit. And already it was thick of action!

The police station resembled a battlefield. Three policemen lay dead within the station compound. Another one lay dead inside the building. A bullet had nailed his head to the wall. A police driver, who had saved himself by ducking under his vehicle's seat, was explaining to his superiors that the man inside the building was shot when he tried to turn off the light.

Gogi drew my attention to the policemen's dress. They were in their lungis and had apparently spent the night merrymaking (broken pieces of liquor bottles covered the ground), unaware that Veerappan and his men were closing in on them.

The spot and timing of the attack had been well chosen - probably the station had been under watch for the past few days. (In the attack, Veerappan and his men made off with guns, SLRs and a lot of ammunition from the station malkhana.)

There wasn't much to be done at Rampura, and so we turned back for MM Hills. I could not help but notice the nervousness of the people I was travelling with in the convoy. Gogi had his revolver drawn. He had a pretended menace in his eyes, as if with his looks he could banish the lurking jungle danger.

Midway in our journey, the advance jeep came to a screeching halt forcing the rest of us to break hard in our path. A few dozen men in khaki were blocking our way. I feared it was another attack… Fortunately the men blocking the road were all foresters who had converged to plead with their officers for a change of guard. The night's grim news had shaken them to their bones!

Most of these foresters were men in their late forties. They were shabbily dressed (most of them in their slippers), were unshaven, carried single shot rifles on their stooping shoulders and had pitched themselves in white tents in isolated jungle clearings. Any one could spot them from kilometers away… I could at once understand why the men looked so blanched… they were sitting ducks for Veerappan if he decided on a target practice some day.

Later, Gogi told me that it was all phantom fear - a condition that afflicts people when they are in danger's proximity. Apparently, the foresters were no longer engaged in flushing out Veerappan and they were back to their business of tending to the wildlife. They had been pulled back, after Deputy Conservator of Forest P Srinivas, the one-man army against Veerappan, was savaged. (The commandos of the Special Task Force (STF) who replaced them, did not think much of the foresters' ability to handle a bandit of Veerappan's calibre.)

It was another matter that the average STF commando could not tell a magpie from a humming bird as far as the forest was concerned, leave aside tracking a jungle werewolf like Veerappan. ...To be continued

Tomorrow: STF chief T Harikrishna sounds an ominous warning