Naxalite who faked death and evaded police for 26 years finally nabbed in Delhi

An untraceable 60-year-old man, a leader of a Naxalite organisation active in Bihar in the 90s called IPF-Maale, wanted in the murder of a police officer was arrested by Delhi Police Crime Branch on Friday.

He was living with a fake identity in Haryana’s Faridabad. He was thought to be dead.

According to a news report in DNA, Crime Branch DCP Rohit Meena revealed that police team had been getting intel on the Naxalite leader being active for many days. After this, Inspector NK Lamba’s team guided by ACP Abhinendra Jain laid a trap for the man, named Kishun Pandit. He was arrested from Delhi’s Pul Prahladpur.

When arrested, the accused tried to trick the police with a fake identity document, saying that his name was Solendra Pandit. However, police interrogation brought the truth out.

The report further states that the accused told police a story fit to be in a film reel. He said that a senior Naxal leader Devender Singh was killed by unknown people in Bihar’s Punpun area in 1996 and his dead body was taken away by the police. Pandit attacked the police party with other members of the party in an attack where a policeman lost his life which three were injured. The Naxalites took the dead body of their leader away. They also robbed the party, taking away a police rifle and 40 cartridges.

The Bihar Police swung into action and arrested 31 people but four including Pandit managed to escape. In 1997, he was declared a public offender by the police with a cash bounty declared on him the following year. Absconding since then, the accused was finally caught on Friday. 

The accused had formulated an elaborate scheme to evade the police, sources told Zee News Hindi as per a report. He orchestrated his fake murder along with his family members where they identified a dead body of a rail tragedy in Bihar as Kishun Pandit and cremated it. This cleared his path to live on with a new identity and trick the police into believing that the accused they were after had died.