Chand was arrested from his West Patel Nagar residence in Delhi yesterday, where he lived with his second wife Nirmal George and their two children.

Additional chief metropolitan magistrate Manoj Jain accepted the CBI’s plea that it needed to take him to wildlife sanctuaries in different states to “unearth his organised syndicate” and granted it 10 days’ custody of the 47-year-old man accused of killing more tigers than anyone else in the country.

The CBI plans to take him to Sariska, Alwar, Bandipore and some sanctuaries in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Dubbed the “Veerappan of the North”, Chand has recently been linked to poaching in southern sanctuaries, including Bandipore.

The court also took on record an application filed by Rajasthan police seeking his custody in connection with a case in Jaipur in which his first wife Rani Saini, a former general secretary of the Delhi Congress’s cell for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and their son Akash are already in custody, along with two others. The case has been posted for hearing on July 11.

Chand was wanted by the CBI in connection with a case filed by Kamala Market police and later transferred to it, in which 41 leopard skins were seized. Around 57 cases under the Wildlife Act are pending against him and his family members across the country.

According to the police, Chand claims he is not a poacher himself but heads a network of poachers in many states who supply him animal parts and skins. He controls a network of tribes who do the hunting, particularly the Bawariyas of Panipat and the Baheliyas of Katni. The poachers sell him each tiger skin for Rs 75,000 and it fetches between Rs 3 and 5 lakh in the international market.