India's Legendary Bandit Killed

India's most wanted bandit, accused of murdering 130 police officers, slaughtering 2,000 elephants, and smuggling millions of dollars of illegal sandalwood and ivory, was killed Monday night in a jungle shootout with police, senior police officers in southern Tamil Nadu state said.

Koose Muniswamy Veerappan, 60, who had eluded police for three decades, was shot to death in a 20-minute gun battle with a special police paramilitary task force just before midnight in a jungle forest, said K. Senthamaraikannan, the superintendent of police for Tamil Nadu.

"Veerappan and three other associates were killed," said the police officer. "We have recovered the bodies."

He said police had received a tip about where Veerappan was hiding, near the village of Paparapatti in the Dharamapuri region, 190 miles southwest of Madras, the Tamil Nadu state capital.

A police intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Associated Press that an associate of Veerappan had surrendered about three hours before the gun battle and led the police team to the hideout.

Vijay Kumar, a superintendent of the Special Task Force, said the police twice offered Veerappan and his handful of comrades a chance to surrender. "The response was not appropriate," Kumar told NDTV television news. "We threw stun grenades and opened fire." He said there were four men with Veerappan and one of them escaped.

Police in Tamil Nadu and neighboring Karnataka state had offered a reward of 20 million rupees -- U.S.$410,000 -- two years ago for information on Veerappan, after he had kidnapped a popular regional movie star and later a politician. The movie star was freed for ransom, but the politician was killed, an act police felt would turn many poor villagers against the bandit.

With his trademark handlebar mustache, lanky frame and camouflage clothes, the flamboyant outlaw had enjoyed a level of celebrity comparable to the Hindi screen idols of India's "Bollywood" movie industry.

Veerappan had escaped brief capture twice. Poor peasants, in awe of his daring and dependent on his handouts, had covered his tracks.

Some politicians were also alleged to be in his pay, and police said Veerappan also used terror to stay on the run — stringing up the bodies of suspected police informants from trees.

Veerappan — whose assumed name translates as "brave" — had been running with his gang of about 20 desperadoes since the late 1960s, when he fell in with ivory smugglers. His turf was dense jungle terrain straddling nearly 4,000 square miles in the southern states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala. He was accused of smuggling ivory from 2,000 slaughtered elephants.

Since 1990, state governments had spent nearly 1.46 billion rupees – U.S. $30 million -- hunting him down. Armed with assault rifles and machine guns, police had used night vision goggles, a global positioning system and helicopters to scour jungles riddled with hideouts.