WOLVES ATTACK INDIAN CHILDREN--PAKISTANIS BLAMED, 20 EXECUTED
India Fighting Plague Of Man-Eating Wolves
Sunday, September 1, 1996
By John F. Burns C.1996 N.Y. Times News Service BANBIRPUR, India - When
the man-eating wolf came to this tranquil village toward dusk on an evening
in mid-August, it was every child's worst nightmare come true.
The wolf pounced while Urmila Devi and three of her eight children were
in a grassy clearing at the edge of the village, using the open ground for
a toilet. The animal, about 100 pounds of coiled sinew and muscle, seized
the smallest child, a 4-year-old boy named Anand Kumar, and carried him
by the neck into the luxuriant stands of corn and elephant grass that stretch
to a nearby riverbank.
When a police search party found the boy three days later, half a mile away,
all that remained was his head. From the claw and tooth marks, pathologists
confirmed he had been killed by a wolf - probably one of a pack that conservationists
believe has been roaming this area, driven to killing small children by
hunger or by something else that has upset the natural instinct of wolves
to avoid humans, like thrill-seeking villagers stealing cubs from a lair.
It has been more than a century since India faced the threat of man-eating
wolves on anything like the scale now terrorizing this region of the state
of Uttar Pradesh. Since the first killing five months ago, 33 children have
been carried off and killed by wolves, according to police figures, and
20 others have been seriously mauled, along this stretch of the Ganges River
basin 350 miles from New Delhi. A hunt by thousands of villagers and police
officers has killed only 10 wolves so far.
With new attacks each week, hysteria is sweeping the area of the killings,
a terrain of lush fields interlaced with rivers and ravines that reaches
about 60 miles north to south and about 40 miles across. More than 9 million
people live in the region in some of the harshest poverty found in India.
A frenzy of rumors has put the blame for the killings not on wolves but
on werewolves, the half-man, half-wolf creatures that have stalked their
way through folklore for about as long as human societies have existed.
Other rumors have put the blame for the killings on infiltrators from Pakistan,
who are said to have dressed up as wolves. Pakistan is India's traditional
enemy.
Villagers have turned against strangers, and sometimes against one another,
in lynchings that have killed at least 20 people and prompted the authorities
to arrest 150 others.
``It's the worst wolf menace anywhere in the world in at least 100 years,''
said Ram Lakhan Singh, the animal conservationist chosen to lead an effort
to kill wolves suspected of attacking humans.
The hunt involves thousands of villagers and police officers armed with
bamboo staves and 12-gauge shotguns. But nobody can be sure that any of
the wolves shot so far were part of the pack that Singh and other experts
believe is responsible for the deaths.
Matters are still far from the disaster of 1878, when British officials
in this area recorded 624 human killings by wolves. But fear is pervasive.
Men stay awake all night, keeping vigil with antique rifles and staves.
Mothers keep children from the fields, and infants are kept inside all day.
In the dark interiors of stark brick homes made clammy by the monsoons,
fantastical stories are told, sweeping aside all attempts by officials to
convince villagers that the killers have been wolves.
``It came across the grass on all four paws, like this,'' said Sita Devi,
the 10-year-old sister of the boy killed by a wolf in Banbirpur on Aug.
16, as she moved forward in a crouch from a cluster of villagers gathered
by a well. She told her story with tears in her eyes, to anxious murmurs
from the crowd.
``As it grabbed Anand, it rose onto two legs until it was tall as a man,''
she said. ``Then it threw him over its shoulder. It was wearing a black
coat, and a helmet and goggles.''
The girl's grandfather, Ram Lakhan Panday, who drove a truck in Calcutta
for 50 years before retiring to his native village, said: ``As long as officials
pressure us to say it was a wolf, we'll say it was a wolf. But we have seen
this thing with our own eyes. It is not a wolf; it is a human being.''
Nearly half of India's 930 million people are illiterate, and the figure
is higher in villages like Banbirpur. Many men head off to Bombay, Delhi
and Calcutta in search of menial jobs, but living in slums among others
much like themselves, they learn little to allay the superstitions of village
life.
In the case of wolves, these are compounded by fairy tales told to children
- Indian versions of ``Little Red Riding Hood'' - in which wolves, and werewolves,
are represented as among the most cunning and dangerous of all creatures.
POONAMALLEE, India (AP) -- After six years and nearly 300 witnesses, a judge convicted 26 conspirators today in the 1991 assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. The court ordered all 26 hanged.
Gandhi and 16 others were killed at a political rally near Poonamallee
in southern India when a Sri Lankan
suicide bomber offered him flowers, then set off a pound of plastic explosives
packed with 10,000 metal pellets.
``The nation stands vindicated,'' said D.R. Karthikeyan, the federal
police officer who led the investigation into
Gandhi's killing.
The sentences, relayed to reporters by Karthikeyan, came hours after
Judge V. Navaneetham announced the
verdicts. Reporters were not allowed in the courtroom.
Although only two defendants were convicted of murder, all were tried
under special terrorist laws that made the
death penalty possible. Death sentences are rare in India, but those convicted
in previous political assassinations
were hanged.
Three leaders of Sri Lanka's Tamil rebels were accused of ordering the
killing. The rebels, charged but never
captured for trial, are believed at large in the jungles of Sri Lanka.
The defendants were silent during today's sentencing and betrayed no
reaction, said Jacob Daniel, one of the
prosecutors.
Arun Sundaram, a photographer whose father was among those sentenced
to death, was working in a crowd of
reporters outside the courthouse when the sentences were announced. He went
pale and stopped taking
photographs.
His father, Suba Sundaram, had supplied a camera to a photographer who
police said worked with the killers,
taking photographs to record the attack. Suba Sundaram was caught when he
tried to retrieve the camera; he
was convicted of obstructing justice.
The case -- which finally went to trial more than four years ago -- was
India's longest assassination trial. The
verdict in the killing of independence leader Mohandas Gandhi came after
two years, and the trial for the killer of
Rajiv Gandhi's mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, lasted 15 months.
Two defendants in this trial, including the man who built the bomb, were
convicted of murder. The others, who
helped with planning or provided transportation, housing or food to the
killers were convicted of lesser chargers.
Lawyers for the defendants said they would appeal.
The Tamil Tigers, fighting for a homeland for minority Tamils in neighboring
Sri Lanka, were supported by
previous Indian governments. But as prime minister in 1987, Gandhi sent
troops to help the Sri Lankan
government try to crush their uprising.
Reaction to the verdict was muted in southern India, populated by ethnic
Tamils with close ties to Tamils in Sri
Lanka. About 100 members of a local political party linked to the Tigers
kept a vigil near the courthouse, but
refused to speak with reporters.
Nearly 2,000 people gathered in the market place listening to radio reports
of the sentencing. There were no
scenes of jubilation, but Raj Kumar, a tailor, said: ``These people deserve
to be killed.''
Indian Tamils had objected to a federal report late last year that they
said suggested all Tamils were responsible
for Gandhi's death. India's national government fell in November because
the ruling coalition refused to oust a
member party accused in the report of supporting the Tigers. Voting for
a new parliament is scheduled next
month.
Fear of the Tigers prompted strict security measures for the trial. About
1,000 police officers were posted in the
area today. Nearby shops were closed.
Karthikeyan led a team of 180 officers who examined hundreds of thousands
of documents, photographs and
hours of videotape. Their first break came when they developed film from
a camera found at the scene, and
identified Tamil militants in the photographs.
Twelve suspects -- including the man believed to have led the hit squad
-- killed themselves by swallowing
cyanide to avoid being captured by police in 1992.
Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv's widow, was campaigning for her husband's Congress
Party in northern India today.
Though not running for office herself, she is trying to help revive a party
weakened by corruption scandals and
lack of charismatic leadership.
