2 top Maoist leaders killed
The crippled Maoist movement in Andhra Pradesh suffered a death blow on Friday with its top leader Sakhamuri Appa Rao being eliminated by the police in an encounter in the coastal district of Prakasam.
In a separate operation, the Warangal police killed another top rung leader identified as S Kondal Reddy in what they claimed was also an encounter in the early hours of Friday.
A member of the Central Committee of the CPI (Maoists), Appa Rao, who was known in the movement as Ravi and Venkanna, was considered a top strategist who, the police said, planned the killings of two top officers K S Vyas and Umesh Chandra, the then home minister A Madhav Reddy and the failed attempt on then chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu in Tirupati in 2003.
In all these cases, Appa Rao was the prime accused and carried a reward of Rs 10 lakhs on his head. This is the second major setback for the Maoist in AP in less than a year. In May 2009, a top leader and expert of guerilla warfare Patel Sudhakar Reddy was killed in an encounter in Warangal district.
Reddy, too, was a member of the Central Committee and the Central Military Commission, the primary organisation that is responsible for the militant activity of the party. Appa Rao was the last surviving member of the two top organisations.
Police said during a combing operation in the Nettikonda forests they came upon a group of four Maoists who fired at them. The hit back and Appa Rao died while three others escaped. Police claimed to have recovered an AK-47 rifle and some explosives from the site.
Revolutionary poet Varavara Rao dismissed the police claim as “standard police story.”
In the Warangal encounter, Solipeta Kondal Reddy, a second rung leader in the state was killed on Friday. While police claimed he died in an encounter, Reddy’s brother and former MLA of the Telangana Rashtra Samiti said Kondal had been picked by the police in Pune three days ago.
TRS leader Harish Rao has called for a CBI probe into the two killings to establish truth while revolutionary balladeer Gaddar said he would approach the state human rights commission for justice.
