New Delhi: To boost the morale of forest guards chasing a set of determined poachers who have already killed five tuskers in the core area of the Corbett tiger reserve, the Wildlife Trust of India has dispatched 130 sets of warm jackets, sleeping bags, and rucksacks. Additionally, WTI has also sanctioned five binoculars and funds to fuel the anti-poaching patrol vehicles totaling an immediate support of Rs 2.9 lakhs. The request from the park authorities was processed and sanctioned by WTI’s Rapid Action Project overnight.

Corbett is under siege, tourists have been asked to leave, all exit points have been sealed, and intensive combing operations and patrolling continues. At the time of writing the poachers, suspected to be five in number, are still believed to be in the Paterpani range of the Park, and each passing day increases the risk of their causing more carnage and slipping away. On Saturday (February 10), the carcass of one more tusker was discovered, and the tusks had been taken away.

This amounts to five tuskers killed and combing operations could reveal more carcasses that have not so far been discovered. The poachers are clearly hardened desperadoes, skilled in their nefarious craft, and no doubt they know the terrain well, or perhaps they have help from somebody who does. Speculation is rife on who the poachers could be, but it remains just that: speculation.

The scale of poaching in the Reserve is unprecedented. The first eight days of February alone have seen three deaths. The first tusker was gunned down on or around February 5, with a muzzle-loading gun using a steel rod as a projectile. The poachers, working through the night, succeeded in removing the tusks.

A second tusker was killed– it was found with two wounds– on February 8 near Paterpani in the core area, about 5 km from the Reserve’s southern boundary. With nearly 250 wildlife guards aided by police combing the forest, the carcass was quickly detected, preventing the poachers from removing the tusks. The terrain is heavily forested, hilly, and criss-crossed by rivulets and dry riverbeds, making combing operations a tough task.

Earlier, two male elephants had been killed in quick succession in the last week of December 2000– one each in the Jhirna range and near Bijrani. One was also killed as early as in October 2000 near Gairal, in the northern part of the Reserve, which makes it the sixth in recent months.

Postmortems of the latest victims have proved that the earlier theory as to the method of killing was wrong. The two December killings were earlier ascribed to the elephants having eaten balls of dough filled with small nails and shards of metal. It is now clear that all the animals were killed by a steel rod approximately 7 cm long, shaped like a steel file fixed in a wooden base, and fired from a muzzle loading gun. This steel rod has been discovered in the latest postmortems.

A poison was almost certainly placed in the grooves cut into the metal rod, but what the poison could be, is not known. According to one theory, it could be M-99 (immobiline), but this is unlikely, because it requires at least 10 cc of M-99 to kill an adult elephant. The metal rod had penetrated the muscle tissues. The elephant fled on being hit, and death took place probably no more than two to three hours later. The poachers followed and hacked away at the face after cutting away the trunk, to extract the every inch of the tusks from their base.

In March 1993 a tusker was killed in Rajaji National Park (Beriwala Range) using a somewhat similar technique. The steel rod was suspected to contain a poison called Abrin, derived from the berries of a plant named Abrus precatorius. However, Abrin is a slow-acting poison that takes five to seven days to kill the targeted animal. The earlier suspicion that a method of killing commonly used in South India had reached North India is probably not correct. It has been used in North India earlier.