Indian commandos hunt the rogue elephant man: A poacher-turned-killer is the country's most wanted outlaw, writes Tim McGirk in the Melagiri Hills

VEERAPPAN is India's most wanted outlaw. More than 600 police are hunting for the elephant-poacher-turned-cop-killer in a swathe of jungle hills the size of Devon, but only two of those policemen are particularly troublesome.

One of them, Police Superintendent Subramaniam, is a dark, energetic man who tests his will-power by periodically walking barefoot over red coals. The other officer, Gopal Krishnan, often disappears into the jungles of Tamil Nadu with a platoon of officers to stalk the elusive Veerappan at night, like dangerous game.

'He's intelligent,' says Supt Subramanium of his adversary. 'And he's very cruel. Veerappan's killed over 300 elephants, shot them point-blank with a magnum rifle. When they were dying, he poured acid on the elephants to loosen the tusks. I think that having slaughtered so many elephants has made him cruel and ferocious . . . He cuts the heads off his human victims and keeps them like trophies.'

The reward of 1 million rupees (pounds 21,000) for Veerappan's capture is so high because most of his 41 victims have been top-ranking police officers and forest wardens lured into ambushes. The others have been either villagers who Veerappan suspected as police informants or bandit rivals.

'The people are afraid of Veerappan,' admitted Shankar Bitari, the police officer leading the manhunt in Karnataka state. 'They won't help us find him.'

The villagers' fear, though, is tinged with genuine respect and admiration for Veerappan. A poor farmer's son from Gopinatham, a hamlet in the wild Melagri Hills between Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala, Veerappan apprenticed himself to an elephant poacher at the age of 12 and has lived in the jungle ever since. He is now 47. He does not drink the arak moonshine of the region, and he treats his many girlfriends in the hill villages with a gentle decency surprising in a killer.

Veerappan is also rich. More than a third of India's 20,000 wild elephants roam this region, and Veerappan's predatory skills came close to wiping out the bull elephants with ivory tusks. In the 1980s he switched to a more lucrative business: hacking down sandalwood forests and smuggling out the rare, perfumed wood.

One of his men had the audacity to imagine that the 2,400-square-mile forest was large enough for two smugglers, and in 1989 tried setting up a rival gang. Veerappan invited the upstart and his four men to a feast at his home in Gopinatham. There he chopped off their heads and dangled them from a village tree. Petrified, the village postman, the schoolteacher and chemist all fled. Buses stopped running to Gopinatham.

Veerappan coaxed back the postman and the others, restored the bus service and won over the villagers by building a Hindu temple and a hospital. His smuggling operations, at their height, also gave work to 400 of his fellow jungle tribesmen.

The outlaw's fame and power spread to such an extent that politicians campaigning for election in the hill villages sought his support - and money. In a taunting letter sent to Karnataka police officers in March 1990, Veerappan allegedly wrote: 'First arrest my political godfathers and only then will I surrender.'

The Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala state governments began their search in deadly earnest after Veerappan ambushed and killed a Mysore police superintendent and five other officers. Then, in November 1991, he murdered another top state official, a senior forest conservator.

After the forest officer's murder, the three states formed a commando task force and sent the soldiers to an army jungle warfare training school. The commandos may have the advantage over Veerappan in firepower, but he knows the jungle terrain better than anyone, and the tribesmen of the area, out of fear and sympathy, are on his side.

Supt Subramaniam, Mr Krishna and the other task force commanders may not have caught the bandit, but they have broken his pounds 500,000-a-year sandalwood-smuggling operation. Within the last few months, however, the versatile Veerappan has begun a new racket: kidnapping managers from the remote quarries and mines inside his jungle fiefdom.

'His war chest is full,' said Supt Subramaniam, 'but he can't come out of the forest and survive. There are too many of us now hunting for him. And I don't think he'll surrender, either, because he knows the police want him dead. He's killed too many of us.'

(Photograph omitted)