Naxals put bomb inside the body of dead CRPF man

NEW DELHI: After finding pressure bombs strapped to the bodies of five out of the nine slain CRPF personnel in Jharkhand, police on Wednesday night found that the Naxals had also planted a bomb inside the body of one of these CRPF men by cutting up his abdomen and later putting stitches on the body.

The bomb was planted inside the abdomen after taking out intestines and spleen of the constable to make space for a small plastic box containing gelatin sticks, a detonator and a battery.

Home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde said this was a "new tactic" deployed by the Naxals and the home ministry officials say they will sensitise state police forces and CRPF to handle cautiously the bodies of slain security personnel in case the bodies first fall into the Naxal hands.

This is because in the present case, CRPF personnel failed to check the presence of stitches on the body of the slain constable Babu Lal Patel, who hails from Allahabad, even as his body was air-lifted last evening from the encounter spot to Ranchi on a helicopter.

The 2.5 kilogram Improvised Explosive Device (IED) may have gone off in case the body had been pressed hard or the Naxals had remote-detonated the bomb when the body was lifted, a source said. The bomb disposal squad had on Wednesday pain-stakingly removed pressure bombs fitted on three bodies before they were air-lifted.

Bodies of two other CRPF men were earlier blown to pieces due to such pressure bombs when villagers were sent to retrieve those bodies and three of them died as CRPF men had little idea that Naxals had booby-trapped the bodies.

In the case of the body of constable Babu Ram Patel, it was the doctors at Ranchi's Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) who first detected abnormality in the body when it arrived for a post-mortem at around 10 pm on Wednesday night. RIMS Hospital director Dr Tulsi Mahto, told ET that this was the first time that he had seen such a case in his professional career.

"Spotting fresh stitches on the constable's abdomen, our doctors carried out an X-ray that showed presence of a foreign object inside the body and the bomb disposal squad was immediately summoned which confirmed the worst after checking the body with a metal detector," the director said.

A bomb disposal squad was unable to handle the matter further and an NSG squad was called from Delhi on Thursday morning that retrieved the bomb from the constable's body after placing the body in a field and doctors later carried out the autopsy. A home ministry official said it was an old tactic of the Andhra-based Naxals to booby-trap bodies of security personnel.