INDIA Outlaw Veerappan killed in ambush

Three members of his gang were also killed.
IN THE SATYAMANGALAM FOREST, India (AP) -- By car, it's just a few hours from Bangalore, the buzzing hub of India's technology boom, to some of Asia's densest forests. They are mountainous places at the other end of Indian life: few people, fewer roads and foliage thick enough to swallow a newcomer in minutes.
It's ideal country for a bandit, and for 25 years the smuggler and poacher known simply as Veerappan made these forests his home, becoming India's most-wanted criminal and embarrassing a generation of politicians unable to bring him to justice.
In a nation where tradition and modernity are forever battling for dominance, he lived like a medieval bandit -- albeit one who profited from the international trade in illegal ivory and other inroads that globalization has made into Indian life.
But in the end, the modern India won.
Roads had been edging deeper into Veerappan's territory, some 4,000 square miles of rugged terrain where the southern states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala meet, and security forces had grown more sophisticated. Thousands of soldiers had been deployed against him. His gang, which once numbered more than 150, had dwindled to less than a dozen.
Caught
Late Monday, more than two decades of running ended: Security forces ambushed Veerappan as he headed to a doctor's visit. When the shootout was over, India's most famous outlaw was dead, along with three members of his gang. "JOY," shouted a one-word headline in The Asian Age.
Among those who feared him, the response was more muted.
"He murdered so many officers," said N. Rajju, a forestry guard at a mountaintop checkpoint deep in the bandit's territory, a region where authorities long ago sealed off many roads as a security precaution. He and his colleagues, Rajju said, seldom set foot in the forests. "He could have kidnapped us at any time."
And now? "Now we are free," Rajju said.
Banditry is nothing new to India. It gave the English language the word thug, after a caste of criminals hunted by British colonials, and parts of rural India are still unsafe to travel after dark. India's most famous bandit, an outlaw-turned-lawmaker named Phoolan Devi, was lionized in movies and became one of the country's best-known figures before being murdered in 2001.
Veerappan was, perhaps, India's last great bandit, a swashbuckling criminal with a flair for the dramatic and an unmatched knowledge of jungle life.
Crimes
Over the years, police say he killed more than 120 people, slaughtered 2,000 elephants for their ivory and stripped forests of rare sandalwood trees. He'd strangled an infant daughter, they said, so her cries wouldn't give away his hiding place, and sometimes beheaded his enemies.
But despite such brutality, his story isn't simple. In villages in the forests, residents say very different things about the bandit.
"He was a good man," said Irappan, a farmer. "He helped people in the villages."
Stories were told of the man with the enormous jet-black mustache who slipped into villages at night, giving sweets to children and paying for supplies. In a region where laborers seldom earn more than 15 rupees -- about 32 cents a day -- he casually distributed 500-rupee bills.
Not surprisingly, he found support among the people cut off from India's blossoming economy. In Bangalore, young people fight for jobs with Microsoft and dance at MTV-sponsored parties, but his supporters -- mostly poor, low-caste "tribals," the indigenous people at the bottom of the social ladder -- hope for such things as electricity.