A joint operation of Bihar police and the CRPF against the Maoists in the hills of Aurangabad district yielded a huge haul of explosives, including 556 improvised explosive devices (IEDs), 16,080 pieces of detonators and four bundles of cordex wire from their hideouts on Friday.

“The operation was conducted in the Laduiya Hills area under the Madanpur block of the district after we received intelligence inputs that Maoists were planning a big attack on the security forces. CRPF commandos, our special task force and police personnel took part in the operation,” Aurangabad superintendent of police (SP) Swapna Gautam Meshram said.

Police sources said that the operation started on Thursday and was still going on in the hilly and forested terrain of the district that the Maoists dominated for the past few decades.

Bihar police’s additional superintendent of police (operations) Mukesh Kumar, CRPF deputy commandant Amit Kumar Singh and assistant commandant Robert Haokip are leading the operation.

The recovered IEDs included 554 pieces of ‘can bombs’ in which steel cans are used as the outer cover and could be detonated with the help of a detonating cord (cordex wire) that uses an explosive core of PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate), or with timers.