In 2021, Gadchiroli police seized firearms Maoists looted in 2002-03

Nagpur: Gadchiroli police, which seized 57 firearms from Maoists in 2021, have managed to recover weapons that the rebels looted from security forces as early as 2002-03 in Chhattisgarh. The cops are now tracing the origin of each weapon seized from Maoists.
District police are now focusing on charting the source of each firearm seized to ascertain from where they were looted by the rebels after killing security personnel.The exercise is being undertaken to ascertain the role of Maoists in targeting security personnel to rob their weapons and use them to launch assaults on the state forces.
A senior official said the findings of the weapon-tracing exercise has underlined that Maoists had been using firearms robbed after killing security forces. “It’s learnt that Maoists have a centralized system of pooling the weapons robbed from security personnel and then distributing them across their cadres,” said the official.
The official added, “We are sending the details of seized firearms to different states and agencies, seeking information like when and where they were robbed, and after killing how many security personnel in such encounters.”
He said police are also seeking technical assistance from ballistic experts and completing legal procedures to return the firearms to the states and units from where they were robbed.
Gadchiroli police also recovered 49 bodies of Maoist rebels from 16 encounters in 2021, which means around three rebels were neutralized per action, setting a record for the last three decades of Maoist violence in the state. Though the number of arrests were lowest (14) since 2009, several top leaders surrendered before the police last year.
“We arrested one injured Maoist who had sustained bullet injuries during an encounter last year. He was provided medical attention and taken into custody only after completing the treatment,” said police superintendent (SP) Ankit Goyal, adding that police’s civic action under the umbrella project of ‘Dadalora khidki’ benefited more than one lakh Gadchiroli citizens in 2021 through skill development training, employment generation and other support.
The SP said every encounter was analyzed, the faults identified and rectified through expert intervention. “The insights gleaned from each encounter were made the basis for future strategy improvement,” said Goyal.
Though more bodies (50) were recovered in 2018, the success then could materialize only after 34 encounters, which are more than double that in 2021. The highest number of arrests (167) had taken place in 2009 when police had suffered 51 casualties (the most in a year) against Maoists.