Sahdev Soren encounter: Slain Jharkhand Maoist leader had escaped from jail van in 2012; killed Babulal Marandi's son in 2007

NEW DELHI: Nearly thirteen years after fellow Maoists helped him escape by ambushing his jail van on its way to a Giridih court, Sahdev Soren , a CPI(Maoist) central committee member (CCM) wanted for over 80 cases of Naxal violence , including the 2007 Chilkhari massacre that had killed former Jharkhand chief minister Babulal Marandi’s son and 19 others, was neutralised in a joint operation by the CRPF’s CoBRA battalion and Jharkhand police.

Also killed with Soren, who carried a total Rs 1.4 crore reward in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, were his two aides. They are Raghunath Hembram @ Chanchal, a Bihar-Jharkhand special area committee member carrying a bounty of Rs 25 lakh and Ramkhelawan Ganjhu @ Birsen, a zonal committee member with a Rs 10 lakh award in Jharkhand.

Sahdev Soren was on Jharkhand’s ‘most wanted’ list for several years and mostly active in Bokaro , Giridih and Hazaribagh districts, or the north Chotanagpur region. It was known for almost five years that he had been unofficially taken into the central committee, though there exists no official CPI(Maoist) document to confirm this. After more than a dozen members of his unit were neutralised in sustained operations since January 2025, he had shifted base to the Hazaribagh-Giridih border along with two of his remaining aides — Raghunath Hembram and Ramkhelawan — to escape a similar fate.

But that was not to be. On Monday, the counter-Naxal forces caught up with him and neutralised him along with Raghunath and Birsen, marking a total clean-up of Left-wing extremists from the Bokaro region.

Announcing this on ‘X’, home minister Amit Shah posted: “Today a joint team of the CRPF CoBRA battalion and Jharkhand police have struck a major success in counter-Naxal efforts ...the notorious Naxal commander and CCM Sahdev Soren @ Parvesh has been eliminated by the forces along with two others ‘reward-carrying’ Naxalites Raghunath Hembram and Birsen Ganjhu.

“With this operation, north Jharkhand’s Bokaro area is totally free from Left-wing extremism (LWE). Very soon, LWE will be eliminated from across the country,” he declared.

Soren is the seventh CCM to be neutralised so far this year.

Soren had joined Left-wing extremism in the early Nineties. He started with arranging logistics and being an informer for Naxalites but was soon handed a rifle; it was politburo member Misir Besra who trained him how to use it. He was involved in several Naxal attacks between 1994 and 2000.

Among the key ones, apart from Chilkhari massacre in which Babulal Marandi’s son was among 20 killed his brother fired at on a football field; are the murder of then Munger SP; the 2005 Bhelwaghati massacre that had left 18 villagers dead; and multiple incidents of looting of police weapons.