The most wanted brigand in the country lies six feet under the ground in a kind of family cemetery near Mettur.

One sad aspect of Operation Cocoon to get rid of Koose Muniswamy Veerappan was to present his body for the final journey without the luxurious handlebar moustache that was his hallmark.

His grieving wife Muthulakshmi, who has raised a few issues regarding his death including the missing moustache, will visit the cemetery tomorrow on his first death anniversary.

A few hundred kilometres away in Chennai, the dapper officer who commanded the Special Task Force sits nowadays in the air-conditioned comfort of his office at the commando school he heads.

Just a year ago, he was patrolling the forests, roughing it out with his men.

On October 18, 2004, his task force slew Veerappan in a hail of bullets aimed at the ambulance carrying the brigand to what he believed was an eye surgery.

A year after the event, K. Vijayakumar, head of the Tamil Nadu Commando Force, says that the killing of Senthil, a sub-inspector on the STF, was what motivated him most fiercely in bringing about a successful end to one of the biggest manhunts in history, for the head of a sandalwood smuggler and elephant poacher on which a price of Rs20 million (Dh1.7 million) had been placed.

"Senthil's death made me very uneasy. I have this habit of placing people in categories. To me, he was A1. To lose him was a big blow and I had to get the man who did this," said Vijayakumar in an exclusive interview on the eve of Veerappan's first death anniversary.

"Veerappan and his gang were parasites who fed on the fear of innocent villagers. They had to be eliminated," said the officer who went on three assignments to the forests on the Tamil Nadu-Karnataka-Kerala border in search of the brigand.

Vijayakumar was one of several police officers who was in danger of being killed by Veerappan's gang.

"We had a miraculous escape. It is a coincidence but we had 45 personnel in a party combing the forest when we came across the 45 pits that his gang had dug to place almost half a tonne of explosives ready to blow in our faces," he recounted.

Will another Veerappan-like figure emerge now that the forest area is not patrolled with the same intensity?

"There will never be another Veerappan. The one man who could have aspired was Sethukuli Govindan. He had the brains, he had the skills.

"But Veerappan, who was given to occasional raving, made sure that Govindan always stayed with him. He felt vulnerable without him, also did not trust him wholly. It helped because we eliminated the whole gang," he said.