Dacca - The guerilla leader waited until two foreign reporters had been in the village for about 10 minutes before he appeared from behind a house, unarmed, but followed by a young man carrying a rifle.
He had agreed to the meeting on the condition that neither his name nor the name of the village he now lives in be reported.
He appeared to be so confident of his safety that no security guards were posted on the muddy road the reporters walked to reach him.
The Pakistan government said the only significant Liberation Army guerrilla elements fighting for East Pakistan's independence operate from sanctuaries across the Indian border, making hit-and-run raids.
The guerrilla, who is deputy leader of a platoon of 37 men, freely conceded that almost all his ammunition and weapons came from India and that he once took his unit into India after a successful ambush of army soldiers that he knew would bring reprisals.
However, he says that his band has been living in the same predominantly Moslem village since it returned from India June 29 and intends to stay well inside East Pakistan.
His men avoid the main roads some 5 miles from their base during the daytime, but otherwise they move freely, the guerrilla said. The night belongs to them and in the day, they have no fear of encountering soldiers in the waterlogged paddies and jute fields of this low-lying land.
They get no pay, but occasionally receive money from across the border which they use to pay for food. Some, the guerrilla explained, is not paid for. "We go from house to house picking up voluntary contributions."
He said the local farmers don't mind supporting his men and they were happy to have them in the village. Residents of a nearby village said later that they resented giving up scarce food, but that they preferred the guerrillas to the army.
All of the platoon's leaders are veterans of the Bengali regiments of the Pakistan army. The deputy leader served for 21 years as a noncommissioned officer before he retired a year ago.
He said that seven platoon members had regular military backgrounds and 30 are students recruited locally after the Pakistan army struck and the civil war began March 25.
The platoon operates independently but has frequent contact with another platoon of roughly equal size that lives in a nearby village.
They receive no orders from higher military authorities but send written reports of their actions by runner across the border to guerrilla camps in India, he said.
His men have sten guns, light machine guns and adequate supplies of ammunition, dynamite and mines, the guerrilla leader said. He added that they have no shortage of medicine.
At the moment he is not interested in finding new recruits and appears to rely for ultimate victory on large numbers of guerrillas now training in India. He maintains that 200,000 will shortly move across the border to attach the army in his sector but that figure seems enormously exaggerated.
He is suspicious of strangers and explained that if a man arrived in the village wanting to enlist, he would be shot as a Pakistan army agent. He was also determined that his platoon will execute any soldier taken prisoner, but none have been captured alive yet.
The largest action his unit has participated in was an ambush that he and other local residents believe killed more than 20 Pakistani soldiers in April.
It was after that fire-fight that he retreated to India, where he was housed and cared for by the Indian army. From the battles he watched at the border, he confirmed Pakistan's allegation that Indian artillery and mortars often fire across the border in support of the guerrilla attacks on the Pakistan army.
Since returning to East Pakistan, his platoon has been relatively inactive considering their freedom of movement in a generally undefended countryside.
They ambushed an army truck and believe they wounded one soldier. Most recently, they raided a police station and captured 13 rifles without suffering or inflicting any casualties after the sentry fled.
The deputy platoon leader says that his unit has not suffered any casualties since the war began and that no one has deserted from his command.
He was reticent about future plans but made it clear that his men will use their dynamite and mines to cut roads in an effort to further limit the movement of the army which relies on its jeeps and trucks and rarely ventures into the countryside.
In addition to harassing the army and police, the guerrillas want to assassinate the members of the Peace Committees - groups of local people who work with the army and often decide for the army which local villagers are reliable and which should be arrested or shot.
Reports of the Peace Committee members being killed are common throughout East Pakistan. The deputy platoon leader's men have caught and murdered one.
Their victim had ordered the murder of two men and, by the guerrilla leader's account, was not unprepared for their retribution.
He asked for an hour to say good-bye to his mother and after that time elapsed eh emerged from the house and faced a "people's court" the guerrillas had hastily assembled by waking up several neighbors.
The unsurprising verdict was guilty and the guerrillas led him about a mile to the main road, where they shot him and left his body by the roadside.
Like the Pakistan army, the guerrillas have given themselves the power of life and death. The leader remarked that he had spent the last night unsuccessfully looking for another Peace Committee member who is marked for assassination.
He believes in the outlawed Awami League of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman who won Pakistan's first national election last December.
He sees the guerrilla movement as the military army of the Awami League and is confident that the Awami League will become the ruling party when East Pakistan wins its independence.
He spoke unemotionally about his guerrilla activities and in his view of the future, predicting that he would not have to live in East Pakistan's villages for long.
So far, the guerrilla leader has run a leisurely, relatively painless underground resistance struggle since March 25.
Most observers here do not share his conviction that the civil war will end soon. His platoon is likely to see much more fighting before there will be a chance that his goal can be achieved.