Security forces gun down 20 Maoists, villagers differ, say they were innocent tribals

In a well coordinated attack, the security forces killed 20 Maoist rebelsin a fierce gun battle with the guerillas that left at least five others injured in south Bastar during the intervening night of Thursday and Friday. Six Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) men were also injured, two of them seriously, and flown to Raipur for urgent medical treatment.
The encounters were reported from three insurgency-hit districts of Bastar region, Bijapur, Sukma and Narayanpur, in which the joint search parties acting on a tip-off launched the operation in the forested terrain and killed the rebels.
As the police counted the bodies to be seventeen in Bijapur after the overnight encounter occurred at Basaguda, some 60 km from the district headquarters, the local villagers contested the claim of the police saying that most of those killed were not actually Maoists but tribals.
“Bodies of seventeen naxals have been recovered. Six CRPF jawans sustained injuries. If those killed were villagers then how could the security forces be injured. They might be members of “jan militia” used as human shields by the Maoists during the encounter. The fierce gunfight occurred around midnight,” Bijapur Collector Rajat Kumar told MAIL TODAY over telephone.
Congress, the main opposition party, has expressed suspicion over the series of encounters. The PCC president Nand Kumar Patel has constituted an 11-member team headed by a tribal Congress MLA from Konta (Dantewada) Kwasi Lakma to probe into the encounters. “Since women and children were also killed in the encounters, doubts and suspicious are bound to arise,” Patel said.
In another encounter at Sukma district one naxal was killed at Jagargunda. “Four Maoists were arrested. None of the security personnel suffered any casualty in the incident,” a police officer in Sukma said.
Arms and ammunitions were seized from the encounter sites of both the districts even as the forces continued their search operation further.
In yet another district of Narayanpur, a joint operation by the district police and central forces were carried out in the dense forested area near Irpanar village close to Abujhmad. “There was an encounter and according to information available two naxals were gunned down but their bodies were taken away by the rebels. Being a difficult terrain it was difficult to chase,” the Narayanpur Superintendent of Police Mayank Srivastava told media persons.
Additional forces were rushed to the area and the Chhattisgarh police further devised the strategy to continue the onslaught on the guerillas in Bastar, which has witnessed the worst Maoists violence in the country during the last decade.
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Published on Mail Today by Sahar Khan, June 29, 2012