After Srinivas' death, you know,
every police officer had in mind
if any one sight of Veerappan or his gang member,
we have to shoot him.
He had taken on the actual might of the police
in such an open and brazen manner.
In part, it was astonishing, shocking,
thrilling, and also very, very unnerving.
When he was young, he would catch monitor lizards by hand.
They live inside tree hollows.
When he spotted them go into a hollow, he'd bravely put his hand inside.
Sometimes these big monitor lizards,
they would bite and rip his flesh apart.
But he'd still not let go and grab on to them.
Similarly,
the police made efforts to catch Veerappan at any cost.
The governments of both states said,
"No matter what happens, no matter how much it costs,
we must not spare Veerappan,
we must catch him dead or alive."
That was indeed a mistake.
When an entire army of men is after you,
it is absolute human nature to flee.
But, in this case,
he, as a rule, turned back,
looked his pursuers in the eye,
and said,
"Catch me if you can."
Chief Minister was begging at that time.
Home Minister was begging.
"You do whatever. You tell how many crores you want, we will give you."
See, the entire government was backing us, supporting us.
So many officers were drawn from Karnataka.
Cream of police officers of Karnataka state.
At that time,
I saw one very active personality.
Very active like mercury.
Shakeel Ahmed.
No loose talks, no unnecessary fun jokes and all.
Very cut and straight fellow.
Then I met the Chief of Police, Mr. Harikrishna.
He was such a daring officer, I have seen.
And very short-tempered.
He said, "Ashok,
we will take Veerappan's dead body procession
in front of Vidhana Soudha in Bangalore."
He was so confident.
We three became one group.
We were like brothers there.
We were collecting intelligence, we were doing the interrogation,
and we were doing the combing, all-in-all.
We were very confident.
The government also declared
twenty lakhs ransom on the head of Veerappan.
WANTED REWARD OF 20 LAKHS
Beautiful posters were made. And fixed in the public places.
So everybody was watching.
Twenty lakhs means, those days, in 1991, it was a very big amount.
One right hand of Veerappan was caught.
Gurunath Achari.
He was a hardcore gang member
and he used to take care of the weapons.
The killing of Gurunath is the first catch
only with public information.
So public also got little relief
and confidence that police can overpower Veerappan.
It is, I tell you, one of the bravest work done by Shakeel Ahmed.
The STF became very strong.
And everybody knew
any moment we would have finished Veerappan.
How overconfident we were.
Any action from police, he will retaliate.
Nobody ever imagined that he would come right into Ramapura
with a band of almost 20 men.
One villager told me,
"We heard this sound,
in the absolute stillness of the night."
"A succession of 'rat-tat-tat' kind of sound."
"Why would someone turn on
the motor pump in their field at this time?"
The police station was under siege.
All bloodshed.
And we saw it was just like a battlefield.
For one death of Gurunath, he killed almost seven people.
See, he took the revenge of attacking the police station
to show he is still more powerful than the police.
Our blood was boiling, actually.
Veerappan thought nothing
about families being ruined
emotionally and otherwise forever.
He was always justifying his actions.
And he was absolutely not remorseful at all
for all the brutal acts of murder that he committed.
Fifteen or twenty days
after the Ramapura station attack,
my second baby was born.
We were constantly on the move, from one place to another.
You think hiding is easy.
We had to walk 40 to 50 kilometers every day.
No one from the team can speak aloud.
I will have to come close and whisper into their ears.
Or I… can hiss
or click my fingers to get another member's attention.
We moved near Nallur.
It was safe for us to stay there.
My husband knew who would betray him
and whom he could trust.
There was a lot of tension in the air in the village.
In the Nallur area, all hell had broken loose.
Police entered Nallur
and were shooting fire into people's houses.
You visited Nallur?
Yeah, many times.
How were the people there?
Not cooperating with the police.
Absolutely adamant people
and not cooperating, not opening mouth.
So Nallur was also burned down, was it?
The huts were burned down--
By the… By the police or…
Yeah, something went on, I think…
I don't remember much now.
A lot of his relatives lived there.
Two or three families knew our spot in the forest.
Did Veerappan know who it was? If it was the police--
Shakeel Ahmed.
My husband said, "I'm okay if he catches me."
"Instead he's catching hold of innocent people who belong in that area
and tormenting them."
"How can I stay quiet after witnessing this?"
"I'm the only one who can punish those officers."
Their injustice provoked him to the point
of making murder seem normal.
In any crime, we make the reconstruction of the crime.
How the crime has happened.
For example, in this incident,
the selection of the ambush place
speaks about the intelligence of Veerappan.
He always selects the hairpin bend.
In a hairpin bend what happens?
The vehicles get slow.
We should not praise him, but outstanding.
Outstanding, I tell you.
Harikrishna drove the car.
Shakeel was sleeping in the backseat.
When they approached the hairpin bend, you know,
Veerappan has put a load of rocks, stones on the road.
So when the car took a U-turn,
suddenly Harikrishna saw the heap.
All the stones were neatly arranged.
To not raise any doubts, we made it look like a temple.
When I saw the white car come, Nephew…
…I knew this was the last day for all of them.
I shot them one by one. Right here, an accurate head shot.
That's it. That was the end of their chapter.
Veerappan shot.
And the bullet exit wound was through his throat.
Car full of blood.
Shakeel was between the constables. His brain, everything splashed outside.
I just sat in a chair
and I was totally blank.
Just imagine my position at that time.
INSPECTOR ASHOK KUMAR AND SHAKEEL
My close friends were killed, so brutally and badly.
And I lost all my confidence.
The STF, you just imagine,
in the absence of very big hands like Harikrishna and Shakeel Ahmed,
how big damage happened to STF.
We thought it is an impossible task.
Protests continue on the streets of Mysore city
demanding action against sandalwood smuggler Veerappan
for the brutal killing of STF personnel
including officers Harikrishna and Shakeel Ahmed.
Speaking to reporters, Karnataka Chief Minister Veerappa Moily said,
the brigand is suspected to have crossed the state border into Tamil Nadu.
Chief Minister Jayalalitha of Tamil Nadu has promised
to intensify combing in the jungles bordering the two states.
Veerappan would commit a crime on the Karnataka side
and very conveniently slip away into Tamil Nadu
until the heat died down here.
So the Karnataka police were desperate
to have the Tamil Nadu police
also get into action in a serious manner.
There was this great sense of resilience in the force.
Every time a policeman died,
there was another who held his hand up and said,
"I'm going to come take his role and do my bit."
There was an officer
in the Tamil Nadu police named Gopalakrishnan.
This man looked like he was destined to finish Veerappan.
He formed a unit
and, quite strangely, named it Jungle Patrol.
Six-footer, very well-built.
And a muscular person like Rambo.
Our 'Rambo' Gopalakrishnan,
he was living in the forest physically, day and night.
He was coming closer and closer to Veerappan's gang
and he was a force to the Tamil Nadu police.
He did wonders from his side.
Rambo also has a track record
-of being a little violent with people. -Yeah.
See, in the beginning what happened, the police, you know, because of hardship,
we were not very diplomatic.
That was a bad era for the people, not Veerappan.
The police couldn't do anything to him. It was the people who suffered.
Gopalakrishnan tied up and punched a cattle herder to his death
in front of that man's wife.
Every village, when attacked, the outcome was Veerappan's retaliation.
Times were bad and it was when this reached Veerappan
that a banner was put up in Kolathur market.
He put one big banner
in a white cloth in red letters.
Tempting words to Rambo Gopalakrishnan.
"You don't have the guts to come and face me."
"If you are really born to your parents, come and face me."
It was a big news and everybody was laughing
and making fun of Gopalakrishnan and his team.
Rambo should have been a little cool-minded
and should have thought why he has put the banner.
Rambo Gopalakrishnan brought two vehicles
and full police force came.
What the team did was…
We weren't there. We were at a different place
around 15 kilometers away.
We heard a loud bang,
and the rumbling sound didn't stop for ten minutes.
It sounded like the hill was collapsing.
Like an earthquake.
When we heard the sound, I could not understand what it was,
but he immediately said, "It's done."
Suddenly, there was a big noise
of explosion.
There was a lot of mud going up in the air and coming down.
I mean, completely dark.
I could not view anything in front of me.
I couldn't understand what happened.
Police had machine guns with stands
that could fire ammunition belts.
My husband considered all of this and decided that,
"The only way I can take this team on
is by planting a bomb."
That was his brain at work.
When we approached the spot,
it was such a horrible scene, I tell you.
I've never seen such an incident in my life.
The bus got twisted and became two pieces.
Pieces of human body were hanging on the bushes and all.
Intestines, skull, helmets, twisted weapons.
Twenty-two people massacred.
I found two constables carrying Gopalakrishnan.
He said, "Ashok…"
"My head is hurt, and my mouth…"
He couldn't speak, and his legs…
There was a lot of blood oozing out.
And his knees… Both the knees were broken.
He was thrown to some few meters up, and he fell down,
sustained severe injuries and fractures.
Otherwise he would have been killed.
Veerappan dug 13 huge pits.
And buried about more than 25 kgs of explosives.
It was a biblical massacre.
Veerappan's latest outrage on the 9th of April
was the blowing up of a bus on the Special Task Force
near Palar, in Mysore district of Karnataka.
Twenty-two people were killed including 15 police informers.
Veerappan is now an insatiable hunter of human beings.
It had been three years since the formation of the STF,
and they had got nowhere near either nabbing Veerappan
or shooting him dead.
They had found it a superhuman task to do so.
But the manner in which 22 people were blown to bits
galvanized both the governments.
The Chief Ministers met.
And they came to a decision to form a Joint Special Task Force.
A lot of myths
began to grow around the phenomenon of Veerappan.
There were crazy, wild, exaggerated accounts of the man.
I remember somebody telling me
that he was endowed with magical powers.
That it is a certain God of the jungle
that is helping him do all this.
Details about him were very sketchy.
At that time,
there was only one black-and-white photo of him,
with his signature mustache, sharp nose,
but nobody knew the truth.
How many people are with him, who are they,
what is their life like in the forest?
None of this was known.
As a journalist, I will be recognized
only if I take steps that others would not take.
He'd say, "These police officers
are making it seem like I'm the only criminal."
"And I'm the only murderer on a killing spree."
"They're creating a false reputation of me."
"Hence, while I'm still alive,
I want the truth to reach the public."
He was firm on this.
Around 4:00 in the evening,
a tribal who was in touch
with Veerappan's gang,
he came walking barefoot and asked, "What's your name?"
I said, "My name is Sivasubramanian and I'm a reporter."
He said, "Brother has asked you to come."
The freedom of press permits a journalist to establish contact with a criminal.
I saw four men in khaki uniform approaching us.
First was Veerappan with a gun slinging on his shoulder.
Dark green uniform, smiling face, good personality.
He greets me and asks what time I came in.
And nowhere do I get any sign that he is a cruel person.
Only one thing was running in my mind, "I need to photograph him."
"Lighting conditions are good."
"Can I take a few photos?" I requested him.
He responded with a gesture. "You want a photo, huh?"
"Arjunan? Reporter wants to take a photograph it seems."
"Are you all ready?"
Veerappan's name was widespread, not his appearance.
"If you let them click your pictures now, we will never be able to go anywhere."
"Don't do it."
I tried to stop him and even cried, but he didn't listen.
"Ah, can we take one now?" he said.
And he was getting ready, putting his chain outside to be visible.
I knew I had achieved something nobody else could and I was elated.
So many photographs.
Holding the rifle and sitting for an ambush.
Walking with the camouflage uniform with the weapons.
We got all his team members' photographs, that is the first time.
That is the biggest mistake he committed.
Then we got the family tree of each person.
Relatives, relatives' friends.
We come to know who all were helping him supply the ration,
supply the information,
and giving strength to the gang.
The intelligence started working.
We have seen his cruelty.
Very closely we have seen.
Such cruelty of act, we have not heard or seen in our lifetime.
We became mercenaries at that time.
Totally mercenaries.
That will not be understood by any court of law
or human rights or anybody.
Only the people who have worked in the operation
will understand the gravity of these things.
And at that time, one powerful police officer
rose from the Karnataka side, Shankar Mahadev Bidari.
He was one of the most efficient and daredevil officers.
Not only brave, but also a very tactful man.
Shankar Mahadev Bidari saw the photographs of all the culprits.
And intelligence started going very deep.
Arrests by the hundreds were made.
Anybody and everybody who was a suspect were rounded up
in that building called "the workshop."
It was not a workshop
where one repaired motorcycles, cycles or buses.
It was a workshop that was designed specifically to torture people.
The whole of Tamil Nadu got scared of this "workshop."
Such was the situation created by Bidari.
He was considered like the judge of Supreme Court at MM Hills.
Whatever he said was the final word.
Until a certain point,
getting rice was easy.
When Shankar Bidari took charge to catch my husband,
a villager buying even a kilo of rice
was caught and questioned.
The workshop was like a second hell.
Our ancestors used to tell us stories about hell.
That we would be thrown in boiling oil, or thrown on fire, alive.
We have seen all of these tortures at MM Hills.
It was a big hall.
Around 15, 20 or 50 people would arrive by bus.
They divided the workshop into two spaces.
One side for the people they liked, and the other for the people they disliked.
At that time, Bidari opened his "third eye."
The "third eye" is called the destroyer.
Made the inmates drink urine.
Made a woman sit naked in front of a man.
This was Shankar Bidari's torture.
The macabre dance of death never seemed to end.
A police convoy was attacked by Veerappan and his men.
When we reached that spot,
blood was still flowing on the road.
Shankar Bidari came, looked around and surveyed the whole place.
He called me, "Puttu, come here."
He was so shrewd that he knew the names of people at the workshop by heart.
He sat on the hood of the car and wrote some names down.
He told me, "Take the jeep and get those eight people."
"Take each of them and make them stand in front of a tree."
All this showed our weakness, very obviously.
Seeing this, I felt so ashamed and extremely hurt
that I thought that us police folks were behaving like bandits.
One lesson that I learnt
during my entire stay in the STF was this.
Don't enrage him.
Contain him.
I have handled, in my service career,
terrorists in J&K, Naxalites in central India,
insurgents in northeastern India.
But Veerappan's methodology,
his modus operandi was totally different.
Veerappan evolved a strategy on the basis of his experience.
He did not study much about guerrilla warfare,
but he was a born guerrilla.
Veerappan's ambush are typical of hunting an animal.
When a hunter hunts an elephant, he knows where the elephant would come.
He laid ambush in such a way that the person was sure to come there,
and he was sure to get killed.
This kind of perfection he had achieved,
otherwise Veerappan would not have survived for so long.
So, a huge number of people going to the forest and getting killed.
I thought, "This is not the way."
Perhaps things would have been done better.
It's a guerrilla warfare kind of a situation, I gathered,
and it required anti-guerrilla tactics.
It should be an intelligence-based operation
by efficient commandos who could live in the forest
and, at appropriate time, they should strike.
Inside the jungle, Veerappan was strong.
Since he practically grew up there, the jungle was his home.
Just like how we know our way around our house.
We know the way to the bathroom even in the dark.
Similarly, the jungle became his home.
So he slowly took more men in his gang, and turned it into a small mobile village.
I imagined myself in Veerappan's shoes
to work out what route he could have taken.
So I decided to go on the route.
I visited all those villages, and set up informants there.
I never told the villagers I was looking for Veerappan.
I only told them, "Let me know if you see any new people in the forest."
Along the way, the locals had seen movements in some areas,
but they didn't know who it was.
"We saw 20 smugglers pass by."
So I decided that Veerappan's gang was somewhere around that area.
Only he had such a big gang.
More than 100 men and women.
Navas wanted to catch Veerappan
at any cost and earn a name for himself
like Gopalakrishnan.
The vigor with which he was looking for Veerappan,
everyone went to Veerappan and told him about Navas.
He called the whole gang together.
He said to them, "My life will be difficult now."
"People with me will be in danger."
"Knowing this, if you choose to stay, you're welcome."
"Let's go west."
We reached Minchuguli Boli and stayed there.
There was a small valley and a stream with water flowing through it.
It was a dense forest
with a variety of big trees.
The trees were so dense, you could hardly see through them.
Even under light, it wasn't easy to see through them.
So my husband decided we could stay there.
And then one day,
"We have no money."
"We need money to buy rations."
And he left.
I was worried that I had to be without him for a few days.
As we kept moving, we got a piece of information.
"In Minchuguli,
there is a lot of human fecal matter."
The villagers I had sent in came and told me,
"It must be sandal smugglers."
We received a lot of intelligence on sandal smugglers then.
"It must be sandal smugglers."
"No, sir," he said.
"Sandal smugglers only eat rice."
"The fecal matter of rice eaters is usually yellow."
"But this was black."
"These are millet eaters."
So it had to be Veerappan's gang.
I was sure of that.
Minchuguli, it was a vast area.
It is in the middle of two to three mountains.
He was confident that police wouldn't come this far.
He wandered around freely, thinking, "Who would come into this forest?"
He made a mistake.
He made huts.
It took us a day to assemble the teams.
Karnataka, the BSF, and Tamil Nadu planned a joint operation.
It was early morning.
Hundred people made one single line,
and slowly we started moving to that place.
We could see two ladies were grinding some ragi or something.
And four people were playing chess.
It was such a safe place.
One of the sentry points was weak.
A boy with the rifle on his shoulder. He came down swearing.
"Motherfuckers dare to mess with me?"
He was walking towards the camp swearing like this.
Another sentry had asked him what was going on.
"The police tyrants are approaching us."
He was arrogantly asking, "What could they do to us?"
The other one couldn't believe his ears. "Yes, they are descending from the top."
When they looked, 150 to 200 policemen were approaching.
Then all of a sudden, they were alerted.
They started whistling.
A type of whistling and sounds of animals.
And they started running.
This was noticed by the BSF people who were in a little elevated place.
So they opened fire.
When they fired, the sound could be felt in our chests.
I couldn't talk or breathe.
I didn't have strength in my body to get up and walk.
I had nowhere to run.
I knew they'd shoot at me if I ran.
I just held on to the stalk of bamboo
and waited there, kneeling.
The police entered through one side and started firing.
Hearing the bullet sounds, the gang started fleeing.
Everyone scattered.
We were shocked to see the place.
Everything systematically he has done.
See, everything was stocked. Including sweets.
Jangiri, jalebi…
All food stuffs in good bottles they were kept, very neatly.
His wife was using shampoo.
Fair & Lovely, so many tubes we found.
The police had closed in from both sides.
They came and asked me, "Are you Muthulakshmi?"
"You know I'm Muthulakshmi."
They tied a black cloth tightly over my eyes.
When Veerappan had left the gang in Minchuguli,
he had around 157 members with him.
Comprising of men, women and children.
A total of 157 members.
When Veerappan returned, he couldn't find his people.
He ran everywhere to gather the lost gang back.
He was not able to find anyone.
The police caught everyone and shot them one by one.
Men, women, and even children were killed without any mercy.
It had caused a great deal of trauma to him.
Veerappan's gang all scattered
in the forest helter-skelter,
and we caught them.
We caught them, and there were encounters.
Some were arrested, some were killed.
KOTEYUR MANI
I could kill 13 of his gang members.
If I had continued in the STF, I would have killed Veerappan.
For Harikrishna and Shakeel Ahmed,
that was my revenge.
The entire gang of Veerappan, when it is reduced to six members,
Veerappan comes to know about his end.
Definite end.
The entire credit first goes to Shankar Mahadev Bidari.
Excellent Commander-in-Chief.
They said, "We have caught hold of Muthulakshmi."
She was beautiful.
If she participated in a beauty pageant,
she would win the first prize without doubt.
On any woman, you would find gold jewelry weighing 300, 400 grams.
But Muthulakshmi had jewelry that weighed about 750 grams.
All of them came to get a peek at me.
I didn't realize they were here to see me because I was Veerappan's wife.
I was only thinking about what they'd do to me.
Just within ten minutes
of taking her to the camp, Bidari came.
He came in a bulletproof car.
Shankar Bidari came with a copy of India Today magazine.
"Do you know who this is?" he asked me.
It had my photo.
"I know." "Who is it?"
"That's me," I said.
"You are famous enough to be on India Today?" he asked me.
I didn't answer.
After the police caught me, my husband became very ferocious.
"I am a man and now I am alone. I can do whatever I want."
He got fearless.
Well, he was already fearless.
But he felt like there was nothing limiting him anymore.
The tenderness I saw in Veerappan's face
the first time was completely gone.
His face had gotten dark. A reflection of some misery in his heart.
He asked me about one thing,
"Instead of just taking pictures,
can you record me on video and play it like a movie?"
I said, "Yes, it's possible. We can also do it."
When Veerappan's interviews were telecasted,
everyone in Tamil Nadu was glued to their TV sets.
As the years rolled by,
Veerappan started giving multiple interviews.
And as you could imagine, they became a spectacular success.
When an issue happens in a village, it stays within the village.
There is a separate law for the politicians.
And a separate law for the public.
An old lady remarked, "Oh, our savior and God has come."
I saw them reacting this way to Veerappan.
It was amazing, and also very, very strange
that he was displaying
a kind of an inherent arrogance that he possessed.
And seemingly, at the snap of a finger,
taking the names of top politicians and bureaucrats.
And almost telling them
how politics should be run.
So the show went on.