Greyhounds is a police special forces unit operating in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and belongs to the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana Police departments. Greyhounds specialises in anti-insurgency operations against Naxalite and Maoist terrorists. Several senior Indian paramilitary and police officers have described the Greyhounds as the best anti-insurgency force that specialises in anti-Maoist operations and as experts in jungle warfare.
History
Greyhounds was raised in the year 1989 by IPS officer K. S. Vyas. Vyas was assassinated at gun point by Mohammed Nayeemuddin and four other members of the CPI People's War Group, on 27 January 1993 while taking an evening jog at Lal Bahadur Stadium in Hyderabad. GreyHounds commandos gunned down Nayeemuddin at the Millenium Township in Shadnagar, 48 km from Hyderabad, on 8 August 2016.
Operations
has been a long-time guerrilla hotbed but since 2005, the presence of Greyhounds in rural areas, supported by paid informers at the village level, has managed to arrest or kill several top rebels. They are dreaded among the rural and remote areas of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, because any contact with them might lead to killings by maoists on suspicion of being police informers. The force, which numbers around 2,000 in the state, moves around in small bands of 15-25 commandos. They are specially trained for deep forest pursuit and combat. Between 2008 and 2010, rebel ranks fell from around 1,000 hardcore members to some 400. Large caches of ammunition were usually recovered from their anti-maoist operations due to their swift and surprise attacks. Over 1,780 Maoists were killed by police between 1995 and 2016 with police recording 163 casualties. This makes them one of the highest success rates for anti-insurgency units. In the period between 2008 and 2017, police killed 700 Maoists and lost 3 officers in the line of duty and is the period of sharp decline in maoist presence. Around 80% of the kills were credited to Greyhounds commandos, who also accounted for about 20% of the total police casualties. 35 Greyhounds commandos were killed in an attack at the Balimela Reservoir, the highest death toll for the force in a single attack. Greyhounds, and special police personnel from Odisha, Chhattisgarh and Maharashtra, conducted combing operations in the Pujari Kanker area near the Telangana-Chhattisgarh border in March 2018. On 2 March, the special forces located and gunned down 10 Maoists, including six female insurgents, in the Pujari Kanker forests. Arms and ammunition were also recovered from the location.
