When 43 LTTE militants escaped from Vellore Fort in 1995 after digging a 153-foot tunnel

Around 3 a.m. on August 15, 1995, policemen on night patrol on Sivagnanam Road at T. Nagar in Chennai stopped two men on a cycle-rickshaw. A constable noticed a handbag and tried to examine its contents. In a flash, one of the men bit a cyanide capsule tied around his neck and almost instantly dropped dead. In the confusion, the other man rode away on a cycle kept nearby with the bag. The police found a Vellore tailor shop’s label on the dead man’s shirt. A few hours later, at the Egmore Railway Station, a policeman in plainclothes, who had worked in the ‘Q’ Branch, noticed a group of 11 waiting to board a Madurai-bound train. He found their Tamil accent different. Suspecting something, he quietly approached the Railway Police. As a posse of policemen walked towards the group, two of them bit cyanide capsules. One of them died and the other was later hospitalised. A few women constables of the Government Railway Police overpowered some of the fleeing men. Angry at being caught, some of them bit the women in a vain bid to escape.

Common link

It did not take long to conclude that the men involved in the two incidents shared a common link. All belonged to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the Sri Lankan Tamil outfit, which was banned in India in 1991, following the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. It emerged that 43 hardcore LTTE militants, including four women, all of whom were housed in a special camp in the Vellore Fort, had escaped after digging a 153-foot-long tunnel in the Tippu Mahal. The tunnel was dug from one of the bathrooms to the moat. “Two batches of six militants each escaped on the night of August 13, while a group of 11 slipped out after midnight on Monday. The rest fled afterwards,” reported The Hindu in its August 16, 1995 edition.

The daring escape had sent shock waves as the camp was well-guarded: it had five watchtowers and two companies of the Central Reserve Police Force to assist the Tamil Nadu Police. Chief Minister Jayalalithaa immediately convened a meeting with Chief Secretary N. Haribhaskar and Director-General of Police V. Vaikunth to work out a strategy to recapture the militants. The Superintendent of Police of North Arcot-Ambedkar district (as Vellore was known then) was suspended, along with officers in charge of security at the camp. The government announced a reward of ₹10,000 for anyone sharing information about the escaped militants. It ordered a judicial inquiry headed by Justice T.N. Singaravelu, a retired judge of the Madras High Court. This was not the first time that the LTTE militants had escaped in Tamil Nadu. In November 1992, 18 militants had escaped from the Tippu Mahal itself. In January 1991, the police opened fire in the Vellore camp, when 400-odd militants attempted to break open the window bars and attack the policemen. Some of them had climbed the terrace of the Tippu Mahal and threw stones and bricks at the policemen standing below. An attempt to set ablaze Sub-Inspector Kannappan after dousing him with kerosene was foiled. A militant, Indiran, 21, was killed in the police firing.

Yet, this was the first time that the militants had escaped by digging a tunnel. “The elaborate planning was proved by the fact that the escapees organised themselves into groups and fanned out to different areas. While one group was believed to have arrived in the city by train, another did so by bus. The direction the other groups took was not known,” wrote The Hindu in a report, ‘LTTE escape: Many questions unanswered’. It said, “People in Vellore expressed surprise and disbelief when reporters told them about the militants’ escape by digging a tunnel using old and rusted pipes and other improvised tools. They were anxious to know whether the tunnel had been dug beyond the rampart wall of the fort. How could they do such a job when the fort had a very deep rocky foundation? they wondered.”

‘Pressmen reluctant’

When journalists wanted to have a look at the tunnel on day one, the police refused permission, citing the judicial inquiry. However, on August 19, journalists from Madras were taken to inspect the tunnel, which had just an 1-1/2 foot x 1-1/2 foot entry point on the first floor of the Tippu Mahal. The exit point of 3 feet x 3 feet was located in between the fort and the moat walls on the western side. “Both the entry and exit points looked so hideous that pressmen were reluctant to pass through the tunnel despite the readiness of the police to allow them. Commandos Sathya and Perumal told this correspondent that they could crawl through the tunnel within three minutes, though the route was zigzag at some points,” read a report. Many of the escaped militants were captured later.

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