THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Putting an end to his flight from the claws of law, the district rural police on Saturday arrested gang leader Biju, infamously known as Attingal Ayyappan, who is an accused in a slew of criminal cases and had been on the run for over 15 years.
Ayyappan was arrested from his hideout in Ponkunnam in Kottayam district. The 51-year-old was last apprehended by the police in 2007 and, after obtaining bail, he managed to escape to Dubai, where he was running various businesses. Sources said he fled the country using a passport obtained in a south Tamil Nadu address. Though he used to visit the state via Delhi, Nepal and Mumbai airports, the police never got a scent of his arrival.
Sources in the police said the Attingal native was good in studies and scored a high first class in SSLC examinations in 1986. It was in his late teenage that he entered the crime scene and soon rose to notoriety. One of the first-benchers in the crime landscape of the capital, Ayyappan was dreaded among rivals and admired among his men. A retired Special Branch officer said Ayyappan was the first among the gangsters in the district to channel their ill-gotten wealth into real estate and allied businesses.
The returns from his Dubai business and the income from the ventures ran by his benamis were invested in neighbouring states. Unlike other gangsters who fled the state, Ayyappan still remained in the dirty business and remote-controlled his manpower to achieve his ends. The police said he had got himself involved in criminal cases in this manner in the last one-and-a-half decades.