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Maoist Rebels Kill 17 in East India Attack on Local Leaders

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Heavily armed Maoist rebels killed 17 people, including 12 local congressmen, and wounded over 20 in an ambush on a convoy in the eastern Indian province of Chhattisgarh, IndianExpress.com news portal reported.

MOSCOW, May 26 (RIA Novosti) - Heavily armed Maoist rebels killed 17 people, including 12 local congressmen, and wounded over 20 in an ambush on a convoy in the eastern Indian province of Chhattisgarh, IndianExpress.com news portal reported.

The attack took place on Saturday evening, when between 150-200 Maoists, both men and women, attacked a convoy of about 20 cars carrying local leaders on the Bastar-Sukma national highway. The insurgents set off a bomb as the convoy appeared and then opened heavy fire on the vehicles.

“First a blast, then there was firing on the second, third and fourth vehicles. They were young women and men. They surrounded us from all directions. Several leaders were killed on the spot,” the portal quoted survivor Chandreshwar Chandrakar as saying.

Among the killed in the attack was Mahendra Karma, a Congress leader in Chhattisgarh state. Karma was known to form a local militia, the Salwa Judum, to fight Maoist insurgents.

“Maoists first asked who is Mahendra Karma... and as he came out of the vehicle with his hands up, Maoists beat him up with their rifles and then fired 10-15 bullets at him,” IndianExpress.com quoted a witness as saying.

The portal, which described the attack as one of the biggest in the history of Maoist insurgency, added that the rebels also abducted state Congress chief Nand Kumar Patel and his son Dinesh Patel.

The Maoists, also known as Naxalites after the village in West Bengal where impoverished villagers staged an uprising against landowners in 1967, have waged a campaign of violence against the government, police and landowners for four decades.

 

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