AP cops raid dead Journalists flat - seize computer,laptop and books

The Andhra Pradesh Police on Saturday recovered two night-vision enabled binoculars, three Maoist central committee secret letters and other propaganda literature during a raid at the rented North Delhi house of journalist Hemchandra Pandey, an alleged Maoist shot dead in an encounter four months ago.

Pandey, a Hindi journalist, was killed along with Maoist central committee member and spokesperson Cherukuri Rajkumar, alias Azad, in an encounter within the Adilabad forests near Hyderabad, on July 1.

A five-member team of the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Andhra Pradesh police raided Pandey's rented house in A-96 Shastri Nagar where he and wife Babita had been staying since February 7.

A senior AP Police officer said the team broke into the house with help from the local police and other witnesses after obtaining a search warrant from a court in Tis Hazari on Friday.

Babita had tried to mislead the Adilabad police by giving them an address the couple had vacated a year ago, the AP Police said. The address she gave was that of a house in Dev Nagar.

However, when she was questioned at the office of Swami Agnivesh in New Delhi about a month ago, Babita accepted that she had been staying at Shastri Nagar and that she had left the place on July 2, after her husband's death.

Babita had told the landlady that she was leaving the house as her mother-in-law had taken ill and did not return. The landlady Rajbala corroborated Babita's version, the police said . In addition to the binoculars and central committee documents, the police have seized about 1,000 books, a computer, a laptop, a scanner, a fax machine and four letters addressed to top leaders of the Maoists.

Although the investigators are yet to access the information contained in the laptops and computers, sources said the three documents of the central committee meeting recovered from the house were crucial.

They throw light on the war strategy, weapons training and indoctrination campaigns being adopted by the rebels, the police said.

Out of the letters seized, two have been written by top Maoist leader codenamed Ajith to central committee member Comrade Sitapathi. Portions of this letter dated December 22, 2009, are in code, an AP police officer said.

Similarly, copies of a press release Azad had issued two days after the Gyaneshwari train blast on May 28, were also recovered from Pandey's house.

Interestingly, many of the nearly 1,000 books in Hindi and English recovered from Pandey's house are not available in the market. These books espouse an ultra left ideology, cover its history and discuss ways to usurp power by the means of an armed struggle.

Sources said multiple copies of different titles were seized from Pandey's residence. These include: 246 copies of Communist Party of India, Maoists Central Committee Ideology and Preface , 16 copies of Hold High The Bright Red Banner of Maoism , 509 copies of Saheri Kam Ke Bari and 63 copies of Political Resolution 2007 Maoists .

Before conducting raids in New Delhi, the SIT team from Andhra Pradesh had been to Uttaranchal in a bid to unravel the network of Pandey and Azad.

India Today..
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