Bokaro, Dec. 28: Bokaro police lost 12 of its men this year to Maoist violence, but senior officers would also like to remember 2009 as a year of moderate success since they were able to pull off the seemingly impossible — arrest Shankar Anna, a top Naxalite leader who was carrying a reward of Rs 10 lakh on his head.

A resident of Andhra Pradesh, Shankar, alias Mohammmad Hussain, alias Sudhakar, was nabbed in February from Chas where he had been stationed to oversee Maoist operations, after intercepting his phonecalls.

Another feather in the Bokaro police cap was the arrest of Janki Mahto, a close associate of Maoist leader Navin Manjhi. Mahto was the rebels’ pointsperson for arms and he was apprehended in August along with a huge cache of weapons and ammunition that had come in from Calcutta to be distributed among Maoists cadres in Jharkhand.

On information provided by the arrested Naxalites, the police later arrested 19 more rebels.

This apart, the Bokaro police along with their Bihar counterpart recovered a huge quantity of arms and explosives, including AK-47 and Insas rifles and over 32,000 cartridges, from a house in the posh residential area of Bari Cooperative Colony.

But according to Bokaro SP Saket Singh, the biggest success for the security forces in 2009 was the peaceful conduct of both the Lok Sabha and the Assembly polls.

“Blowing up a school buildings and community centre was an act of cowardice,” he said, referring to the recent incidents in Tiskopi (Gomia) and Palamu (Nawadih).

“The Maoists are now losing rural support as more villagers are coming forward to help the police… even school students are protesting their action of blowing up school buildings,” Singh added.

But June 12 proved to be a Black Day for the Bokaro police. As many as 12 policemen lost their lives — two of them fell to rebel bullets around Phusro in Bermo, while 10 others were killed when an armoured truck was blown up while going through a highway that had been booby-trapped with landmines.