Chaudhary, who joined the UCPN (Maoist) five years ago, had collaborated six months ago with Rajendra Bisunke, 22, and Kishor Bisunke, 23, of Jeevanpur VDC-4 in Dhading district, to extort people in the name of DYF. [break]
According to Inspector Krishna Koirala of the Metropolitan Police Crime Division (MPCD), the trio had been threatening at least 50 people over the period and even extorted some of them. They have also been accused of engineering three different incidents of explosions in the capital.
The MPCD squad nabbed Rajendra from his home in Dhading on Saturday while Sher Bahadur and Kishor were subsequently arrested in the capital. Police seized two different certificates of combatant training and two documents approving home leave issued by the PLA´s Third Division in Chitwan from Sher Bahadur´s rented room at Bhainsepati in Lalitpur.
Also extracted from him were DYF letter-pads, SIM-cards used to threaten people, donation receipts and list of people whom they were planning to extort.
According to MPCD, around a dozen persons have approached them with complaints of extortion by the group. Madhav Regmi, of Jeevanpur VDC-5 in Dhading, who paid Rs 26, 000 to the group following continuous threats over phone four months ago, said he knows at least 30 persons who have been under threats from the group.
Most of the people who were threatened and extorted by DYF are from Dhading and running businesses in the capital. They include acquaintances of Bisunke duo. According to the victims, the group had set off a bomb at the house of Raj Kumar Kunwar, the principal of a local secondary school, at Noubise in Dhading in the second week of July. The incident followed separate explosions at New Baneshwor on May 23 and July 2 respectively.
Sher Bahadur has given varied details about where he obtained the bombs but he most probably made them himself, investigators said. Investigators are also looking into possibilities of involvement of another combatant whose documents were being used by the alleged to buy SIM-cards.
Kishor Bisunke, who was briefly interviewed by Republica at MPCD, said he and his nephew Rajendra, who is a cadre of Maoist sister wing Rastriya Dalit Mukti Morcha, decided to operate the extortion racket with Sher Bahadur after meeting the latter at their shoe shop in Lalitpur six months ago.
“I needed money after I was injured in a road accident. Then he came up with the idea of easy money,” he added.
Victims have paid up to Rs 300, 000 each to avert threats from the group, according to Regmi. “Many more victims could come up with complaints now that the group has been busted,” he said. “Almost everybody in our village and other neighboring places who are seemingly in better financial position has been extorted.”
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