PATNA: A police chowkidar was dragged out of his house and shot dead in cold blood by the Maoists in Bihar’s Gaya district late on Wednesday night.
The bullet-ridden body of Rajeshwar Paswan, 45, was recovered near a canal at Rengania village under Amas police station on Thursday morning. In a handwritten note the rebels left at the scene of the crime, they said Paswan was punished for being a police informer.
“Half a dozen armed men arrived at his house late in the night and dragged him outside. They took him outside the village and shot him dead. The killers are believed to be Maoists. The matter is being probed,” said Amas police station officer-in-charge Chandra Prakash Singh.
Paswan’s body was sent for an autopsy to Anugrah Narayan Magadh Medical College and Hospital (ANMCH) in Gaya. Police sources said the chowkidar was under the hit list of the leftwing rebels for the past few months for the inputs he had been providing on their activities.
Gaya is one of four southern districts of Bihar which are part of the country’s 30 districts that are the most affected by leftwing extremism. The other three districts in the state are Aurangabad, Jamui and Lakhisarai. Two other Maoist-affected districts in Bihar – Nawada and Muzaffarpur – had shed the “worst-hit” tag in the home ministry’s latest assessment in April.
With a marked reduction in incidents of violence perpetrated by the leftwing insurgents, Bihar is now ranked fifth among Maoist-affected states, below Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and Maharashtra. In the Union home ministry’s rankings last year, Bihar was ranked third. The state witnessed only 33 incidents of Maoist violence during the first six months of this year, according to the ministry’s half-yearly review.
In rural areas of southern Bihar, the Maoists often kill ordinary citizens and security personnel they suspect of being police informers. In September, a jawan of Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) was shot dead outside his home by the Maoists in Jamui district after being suspected of being a police informer.