Maoist rebels kill dozens of police officers in India

Maoist rebels killed up to 73 paramilitary police as they were patrolling the jungles of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh this morning in one of their bloodiest single attacks on security forces.

Hundreds of the guerrillas – also known as Naxalites – ambushed about 80 members of the Central Reserve Police Force at dawn with a hail of automatic gunfire and landmine explosions, police said.



The rebels also surrounded reinforcements who rushed to the scene, and blew up a heavily armoured anti-mine vehicle sent in to retrieve the wounded, the police said.





"Something has gone very wrong," Palaniappan Chidambaram, India's Home Minister, told reporters. "They seem to have walked into a camp or a trap."

The attack highlights the growing threat from India’s Maoists, even as the Government presses ahead with a nationwide campaign launched last year to root them out of their jungle strongholds.

The Naxalites take their name from the village of Naxalbari in the Indian state of West Bengal, where their revolt began in 1967.

Since then, they have grown into a force of about 20,000 armed cadres and as many as 100,000 militia members who control a “Red Corridor” of dense forest stretching from the east coast to the border of Nepal.

Manmohan Singh, the Prime Minister, has described them as the country’s biggest internal security problem.

Mr Chidambaram went further this year, saying they had a presence in almost a third of India’s districts and represented a graver threat than the Pakistan-based Islamist militants behind the attack on Mumbai in 2008.

He has vowed to defeat the Naxalites within two to three years by deploying thousands of paramilitary forces in Operation Green Hunt.

But critics say that will be impossible given the chronic shortage of training, equipment, personnel and reliable intelligence among police and paramilitary forces in the worst affected states.

The rebels also appear to be escalating their activities in retaliation, with Maoist violence claiming 908 lives in India in 2009, the highest since 1971, according to the Home Ministry.

On Sunday, they triggered a landmine blast that killed ten police in the mineral-rich eastern state of Orissa.

In February, they killed at least two dozen police in a surprise daylight attack on a camp in West Bengal.

Today’s attack bore similarities to another one that killed 55 policemen in Chhattisgarh in March 2007.

The Maoists are also increasingly targeting railway lines and factories as part of a campaign to cripple economic activity in many of the mineral-rich and remote mining regions of India.

The Government estimates that they extort more than £200 million from companies every year.

Indian security officials also believe that the Naxalites are planning to expand their activities into major cities including Mumbai and Calcutta.


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