Burdwan, July 3: Three CPI (Maoist) leaders were picked up last night from a forest in Burdwan where they had assembled for a secret conclave.

They have been identified as Prasanta Roy, Gautam Bhattacharya and Ajit Haldar.

The police intelligence wing is particularly perturbed as the arrests were made barely 12 hours before the chief minister drove into the Durgapur Projects Ltd guesthouse, 25 km from where the Naxalites were meeting.

On his way back to Calcutta from Purulia, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had made a stopover in Durgapur.

District police chief Niraj Singh said a team that raided Jangalmahal in the Kanksa area, about 170 km from Calcutta, caught the rebels off guard.

Bhattacharya, said to be from Sonarpur in South 24-Parganas, is a civil engineer who passed out from then Regional Engineering College, Durgapur, in 1981, the police said. They also claimed that the catch was a major success. “We have found documents and blueprints for making explosive devices, which will lead to more arrests and information about Naxalite activities in neighbouring Bankura, Purulia and West Midnapore,” an officer said.

The three rebel leaders were produced in Durgapur court today and remanded in police custody for 10 days.

“They had come from other districts and taken shelter in the forest to plan subversive activities,” said Singh.

Roy, a resident of Onda in Bankura, used to stay at Andal in Durgapur. Haldar, from Hanskhali in Nadia, had also taken shelter in Durgapur.

“We have found in the papers plans to attack or blow up police stations. There were also notebooks with details of how tribals of Bankura, Purulia and West Midnapore are ‘exploited’ and how they could be freed,” Singh said.

Suspected Naxalites here have pasted posters in and around the railway station, the office of the district magistrate and the medical college and hospital claiming responsibility for the murder of CPM activist Basanta Dutta.

On June 7, a gang of five had raided Dutta’s home and hacked him to death.

The police said Jangalmahal was a safe corridor for the rebels as it provided easy access to hideouts in Jharkhand, West Midnapore, Birbhum, Bankura and Purulia.