(New Delhi) At least 26 Maoist rebels were killed on Saturday in armed clashes with Indian special forces in a remote jungle area a thousand kilometers east of Mumbai, capital of Maharashtra, police said.
Police said three members of the special forces were seriously injured in the clashes that lasted several hours in the jungle of Gadchiroli district and that fighting erupted after a group of rebels was intercepted in the Mardintola forest. .
“At least 26 Naxalites are dead,” a Maharashtra police officer told AFP, who asked to remain anonymous, using a local term for the rebels.
He said special forces were continuing search operations in a remote area amid sporadic fire.
Gadchiroli police chief Ankit Goyal told AFP that efforts were being made to find the bodies of slain rebels. “The exact number of killed and their identities will be known once the bodies are found,” he said.
The three injured among the special forces had to be airlifted to the big city of Nagpur.
These deadly clashes in Gadchiroli are the most recent of the Maoist insurgency that has claimed thousands of lives since the 1960s.
Tracing its origin in a peasant jacquerie in a village in West Bengal in 1967, the Maoist guerrillas have been fighting New Delhi by arms for half a century. It is now folded into a “red corridor” of forests in central and eastern India. The conflict has intensified since the arrival as prime minister of Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist leader.
The government has deployed tens of thousands of men to fight the rebels. Delhi has also injected millions of dollars to develop infrastructure in these tribal regions, and claims to have rolled back and contained the insurgency in 53 districts, up from 96 in 2010.
Police in eastern Jharkhand state, one of the most affected, announced on Friday the arrest of a prominent rebel leader, Prashant Bose, over 70.
A price was put on his head. The authorities had promised 10 million rupees (134,000 dollars OR 117,000 euros approximately) and he was arrested in a district of Seraikela. Prashant Bose is accused of plotting more than 100 violent attacks over the past four decades.