An NIA team inspects the site of the Maoist attack in Bastar on Tuesday. (PTI)

Hyderabad, May 28: Saturday’s ambush was planned with inputs from unsuspecting household staff of local Congress leaders, Maoist sources told The Telegraph.

The massacre was apparently waiting to happen for the past month and a half, ever since the Congress announced its three-day Parivartan Yatra schedule in Bastar.

“We immediately began keeping tabs on local Congress leaders’ movements and gleaned information about the convoy from their domestic hands and drivers,” a rebel source said.

A senior police officer agreed that such an operation would need weeks of preparation: “You can’t marshal over 200 guerrillas to a single spot within two or three days.”

The blueprint was prepared by Maoist No. 3 and central committee member Katakam Sudarshan, who carries Rs 25 lakh on his head and plotted the 2010 attack that killed 75 CRPF men at Chintalnaar in Chhattisgarh.

From his hideout 60-70km away, the master guerrilla strategist barked orders over walkie-talkies to the field operatives at Ground Zero as the operation wore on.

Women cadres filmed the entire carnage with their laptops and, some Maoist sources claimed, kept sending the pictures via Internet to Sudarshan who watched them in real time and guided the operation. They said that although mobile and Net connectivity is erratic in the region, BSNL does keep lines working during VVIP visits.

Local police and other sources cast doubt on the claim, saying one reason the spot in Geeram valley — where legend says Ravan killed Jatayu — was chosen for the ambush is its lack of connectivity. They suggested the pictures must have been sent later so the mastermind could assess the cadres’ performance and plan future attacks better.

The feed shows victims pleading for their lives, Maoist sources said. Survivors have told a visiting Andhra Pradesh police team from Bhadrachalam that the more they begged for mercy, the “more arrogant and louder” the cadres’ slogans became.

The plot

Present at the ambush site were two commanders who had helped Sudarshan with the planning: Paka Hanumanthu alias Ganesh, secretary of the Darbha Ghati action committee, and Ravula Srinivas alias Ramanna. Both are members of the Dandakaranya special zonal committee.

Sources in the anti-Maoist intelligence unit in Hyderabad said the attackers included 135 People’s Guerrilla Liberation Army cadres, 50 members of the Maoists’ Central Military Commission which functions under the central committee’s direct orders, and 50 commandos from three other regions of the Andhra-Odisha border and Jharkhand zones.

The information-gathering was done by local cadres but the attackers, as in all major Maoist operations, were non-locals who escaped to their areas after the operation. Sources said that if local Maoists were involved, they would be easier to identify and catch by keeping a watch on — and even torturing — their families.

Sources said the area had already been booby-trapped with landmines years ago, suggesting it had been marked out as a prime ambush spot. The road is notorious for its sharp bends.

“We had repeatedly asked the state police and administration to either build a bypass or put up a few check-posts at the bends in the Darbha and Geeram valleys,” a senior officer in the anti-Maoist intelligence unit said.

The Maoist commandos split into three groups and lay in wait, taking control of a 1km stretch of the highway since 4pm, less than half an hour before the motorcade passed. Some 50 guerrillas stayed behind to cut off retreat towards Sukma.

Some 40 women, aged 18 to 25, took part in the ambush carrying laptops, walkie-talkies, cameras and medicine kits for the injured guerrillas. Some of them apparently posed as wood-pickers and water carriers and watched the road before the attack.

The sources claimed the rebels were considerate towards the Congress leaders’ security officers. “They shot the guards in the leg after taking their weapons away.”

The attack has exposed the lack of communication between the state police and paramilitary forces.

“We can’t understand why the CRPF camp off Sukma was not kept in the loop,” a senior CRPF officer said in Hyderabad.

The mastermind

Sudarshan, 53, is short, dark-complexioned and a college dropout. Like the Maoists’ shadowy chief Muppala Lakshman alias Ganapathy and slain leader Kishan, Sudarshan too is from Telangana.

He heads a unit of the People’s Guerrilla Liberation Army and is a member of the Central Military Commission, which has planned major attacks including a bid on former Andhra chief minister Chandrababu Naidu.

A native of the coal town of Bellampally in Adilabad district, Sudarshan dropped out of a polytechnic college in Warangal in the late 1970s and joined the Radical Students Union and then the People’s War Group, which later became a constituent of the CPI (Maoist).

Sudarshan is an accused in 27 cases.