Patna, June 13: The forest department today claimed to have laid its hands on an aide of the poachers who killed a rhino at Valmiki Tiger Reserve (VTR) a month ago. He has been arrested.
The accused, Buddhu Ansari of Valmiki Nagar, has been forwarded to judicial custody. He was arrested on June 2.
“Based on our intelligence inputs, we took Buddhu in custody. After interrogation, he was produced in a local court, from where he was forwarded to the judicial custody,” a VTR official told The Telegraph today over the phone.
The official said the arrest was made on the basis of the statement of a “very important link” in the case whose name cannot be disclosed at this stage of the investigation. He did not reveal if the department had collected any concrete evidence against the arrested person, though.
According to the residents of the area, Ansari has a very chequered past. On the pretext of providing information to police and forest officers, he used to play the role of conduit of gangs engaged in smuggling of wildlife items. The forest officials are tight-lipped over the issue.
Apart from Ansari, VTR officials are suspicious about the role of one Parmatma Mahto in the rhino poaching case. A tiger tracker in the reserve, he stopped reporting for work after an informal interrogation by the VTR officials. The forest officials are suspecting that he has sneaked into Nepal to evade arrest.
The VTR officials are confident of the arrest of the people involved in the rhino poaching soon.
“We are in close touch with our counterparts of Chitwan National Park of Nepal and are sharing information with each other on a regular basis regarding the developments in the case. We are also sharing information being gathered by local sources so that the culprits could be arrested,” a VTR official said.
VTR and Chitwan National Park share a long boundary. Animals of these two reserves keep on moving from one side of the border to the other, as the forest area is contiguous.
The official also said the poachers had goaded the rhino of Chitwan National Park towards VTR. After cornering it in an isolated location of VTR, they killed the animal.
“The residents of the area gave us this information recently and the postmortem report of the animal also supports this theory as the rhino had a bullet injury in its leg, which was a bit older than the one found in its head, which led to its death,” added the official.
The incident of rhino poaching came to light when VTR officials on May 10 recovered the body of a female rhino from Valmiki Nagar range of VTR, around 320km north of Patna. The body appeared to be more than a week old and its horn was missing.
Following this incident, the VTR administration swung into action and suspended a forester and a forest guard for allegedly failing to keep track on the movement of the animal.
Taking a cue from this incident, the VTR administration has intensified patrolling in the Madanpur range of the reserve, where three rhinos are residing for the past five years. These rhinos, too, had come here from the Nepal side.
“Apart from putting the three rhino trackers on special alert, we have also started using an elephant for carrying out the patrolling work to put effective check on poachers,” a senior VTR official said.
