HE WAS an Indian Osama bin Laden and Robin Hood rolled into one: endlessly elusive, apparently uncatchable, evading troops sent to search for him even as he mocked them from his jungle lair.

He cast himself as a people’s champion fighting for the rights of the Tamil minority and frequently made political demands in exchange for his captives’ release — most sensationally when he seized the Bollywood matinee idol Rajkumar. Police dismissed him as a mere thief.

But the long and bloody reign of Koose Muniswamy Veerappan, India’s most-wanted bandit, came to a sudden end when he was shot dead in a midnight gunbattle in a southern jungle after more than three decades on the run.

Bandit, murderer, elephant poacher and sandalwood smuggler, Veerappan, 57, stood accused of the murder of more than 150 people, the slaughter of 2,000 elephants and dozens of kidnappings, including that of a former state minister and Rajkumar, southern India’s most-loved movie star.

Nicknamed “the Jungle Cat” for his animal-like ability to move concealed through the thick and sprawling Sathyamangalam Forest, he evaded the task force set up to track him down.

On Monday night, that force caught up with him as he and his henchmen travelled in an ambulance along a jungle road near the village of Paparapatti in the district of Dharmapuri in Tamil Nadu state. He had gone there in search of treatment for his diabetic condition.

Unknown to him, the ambulance was driven by a police informer. As they travelled along the jungle road, police lay in wait, surrounding the vehicle with troops.

Through loudspeakers, they exhorted the bandit to give himself up. There was a pause of a minute, then gunfire erupted from the ambulance and the police returned fire. Twenty minutes later, Veerappan and three of his henchmen, the bulk of his remaining gang after years of attrition, lay dead on the floor of the vehicle.

Police and politicians alike could barely disguise their triumph as the bodies of the men were laid out for inspection by journalists as proof that the Bandit King was dead. “It is with a sense of pride that I wish to announce that the notorious forest brigand, bandit, murderer and dacoit, Veerappan, along with his entire gang, has been shot dead,” Jayaram Jayalalithaa, the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu State, announced.

Rajkumar, whose kidnap ordeal brought Veerappan back into the headlines in 2000 — and ended with the payment of a substantial ransom — was more concise: “It is good riddance,” he said.

Veerappan first came to the attention of the police as a teenage elephant poacher and then as a player in the lucrative sandalwood smuggling trade. But it was not until he graduated to murder that the security forces began to take note. His first victims were forestry officials, but the brutality of the murders did not stop him trying to cast them as political acts.

“I killed him with one shot,” he said of his second victim. “Then I cut off his head. Then I hacked off his hands. I said: ‘You have killed so many people, now have a taste of your own medicine.’ I kept his head as a souvenir.”

Veerappan’s bloodlust became so legendary that it became hard to tell fact from fiction. He is said to have killed his own child with his bare hands to stop her cries giving away his position to police. His greatest moment of notoriety came when he kidnapped Rajkumar in an episode that gripped the country for three months and brought rioting fans out on to the streets. Atal Behari Vajpayee, then the Prime Minister, said that it was just as well Rajkumar emerged alive or Karnataka, his home state, “would have burnt”.

Harran Nagappa, a former minister of the state, was less fortunate. His corpse was discovered in the jungle more than three months after he was kidnapped from his home in Mysore. A note from Veerappan blamed the police.

His extraordinary ability to evade capture led to the formation 15 years ago of two task forces, one in Karnataka and one in Tamil Nadu.

For years, he ran rings around them, relying on the loyalty of villagers who fed on his largesse, swapping silence about his movements for sums of money doled out for daughters’ dowries and the building of temples.

Veerappan rarely left the denser reaches of the jungle, where he felt safest from the troops hunting him. He was said to have adopted the behaviour of jungle animals to elude capture, learning the sounds that birds made when human beings were approaching as an early-warning system.

“If you took him to the city, he’d be lost, but in the jungle he is king,” Tirumala Srinivasulu, a former Karnataka police chief who spent his career in pursuit of the forest-dwelling brigand, said two years ago.

Ten years ago, the bandit murdered five villagers after discovering that they had informed on him. Since then, it had become all but impossible for police to gather information from local people.

Veerappan’s story inspired two Bollywood movies, but neither told the story of his life from small-time crook to most-wanted murderer. It was one of his greatest wishes. Now the saga finally has an ending, that wish may be fulfilled.

LIFE OF CRIME

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