After Veerappan’s death, he is India’s most wanted poacher and he doesn’t live in deep jungles but operates from Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar. Now the CBI says Sansar Chand is responsible for the disappearance of several tigers from Sariska.
Chand, implicated in over 30 cases of wildlife smuggling, has been on the run for over a year, and several members of his family are in prisons in Delhi and Jaipur. With the disappearance of tigers hitting national headlines, several state police teams and two squads of the CBI are now trying to nab him.
‘‘We have enough evidence to link Sansar Chand to the tiger poaching cases in Sariska, for which we conducted a preliminary investigation two months ago. He is a prime accused in the two Delhi cases routed to us,’’ says CBI Director, U S Mishra. ‘‘We feel we are close to getting Sansar Chand but luck will also play an important role.’’
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Poachers in Sariska—four of them are behind bars—have confessed to 10 separate incidents of killing of tigers and leopards in the sanctuary. They showed the investigators the precise spots where 10 tigers and four leopards were killed between June 2002 and July 2004. Investigations reveal the Sariska tigers were caught in steel traps and then shot.
• Who is this Sansar Chand? Arrested five times, now on the run • Sansar Chand is India’s biggest skin smuggler, who belongs to the Gihara tribe of hunters. Arrested over a dozen times, first in ‘74 when he was 18. • Has been convicted only twice. Once in Ajmer in ‘04, got five years rigorous imprisonment for smuggling two leopard skins. Got bail in three months, jumped it. • 30 members of Sansar Chand’s family work with him. His wife Rani, son Akash and niece Ritu are behind bars.
Confessions of the arrested Sariska poachers point to Chand’s role. One of the poachers, Heera Lal Khatik, told the investigators about his sale of tiger skins directly to Sansar Chand.
Khatik confessed to selling a tiger skin to Chand for Rs 79,000 in October 2004. He said he contacted Sansar Chand on his mobile phone. He then reached Delhi, called Chand from a PCO booth and handed over the tiger skin to him. Other Sariska poachers, too, have described their deals with Chand.
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Officials say that his role is also mentioned in the 35-page report prepared by the CBI for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. His was also a case study in the CBI’s presentation at an Interpol conference on wildlife crimes at Lyons earlier this month.
Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption.
Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More
