Maoists Kill 24 Cops In Terror Attack In Chhattisgarh
Dated 10/7/2007
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Twenty-four Indian policemen who had gone missing after a fierce gunbattle with Maoist insurgents in the jungles of central India were found dead and riddled with bullets on Tuesday, police said.
The missing men were part of a group of 115 troopers -- not 90 as the police had said earlier -- who fought the rebels for two hours in a hilly forest on Monday in Dantewada district in the state of Chhattisgarh, close to the epicentre of the insurgency.
"Search parties have recovered all the 24 bodies from very close to the encounter site," state Inspector-General of Police Girdhari Nayak told Reuters.
Another police official described the bodies as bullet-ridden and said the rebels had stripped the corpses of their weapons.
Earlier, authorities in the poor and underdeveloped state had said they had lost contact with the policemen for almost 24 hours and had sent several troops of around 30 to 40 men to look for them.
Many of those troops are still in the jungle and engaged in gunfights with rebels after a day of sporadic skirmishes, the official added.
Maoist rebels operate in a large swathe of India stretching from the east to some southern states, mostly in the countryside, and attack government officials and property.
They say they are fighting for the rights of millions of poor peasants and landless labourers. Thousands of people have been killed in the insurgency which began in the late 1960s.
In March this year, Maoist rebels stormed a police camp in Chhattisgarh, killing 55 members of the police and tribal militia in what was one of the deadliest attacks in years.
Elsewhere, in the southern state of Karnataka, police said they had killed five Maoist rebels in a gun battle in the hilly district of Chikmagalur, about 250 km (155 miles) west of the state capital, Bangalore.
"A massive combing operation is on to hunt for accomplices," said state police chief K.R. Sreenivasan.
Karnataka is among the most recent of India's states to be hit by the Maoist insurgency. The police action came a week after a group of suspected Maoists set a government bus alight in the region.