Three women Maoists were on Friday arrested in Odisha's Gajapati district and a huge cache of arms and ammunition was recovered from them, police said.
The police raided a Maoist camp near a forest near Mohana, about 300 km from Bhubaneswar during a combing operation in the morning and nabbed the rebels, belonging to breakaway Maoist group Odisha Maoist Party (OMP) led by Sabyasachi Panda.
“An AK-47, two INSAS, four SLRs, three 9mm and two 2mm pistols, one tiffin bomb, 13 magazines and cash worth Rs.10.5 lakh were seized from their possession,” southern range deputy inspector general of police Amitabh Thakur said.
Panda was the secretary of the Odisha State Organising Committee of the Communist Party of India (Maoist). He floated the OMP in August 2012 after parting with the CPI (Maoist) following his open criticism of the parent party’s general secretary and supreme commander Mupala Laxmana Rao alias Ganapathy as “autocratic” and “dictotarial”.
Since then the police have made several unsuccessful attempts to nab Panda though his strength in his area of operation covering Rayagada, Gajapati, Kandhamal and Ganjam has diminished to a large extent.