By IANS
Raipur : Maoist guerrillas shot dead a special police officer (SPO) Monday in Chhattisgarh’s trouble-torn Dantewada district, police said.
Three gunmen shot 30-year-old SPO Mangu at 9.15 a.m. at a weekly market in Bhansi village, about 400 km from here. The victim died on the spot, while the militants managed flee, a senior police officer told IANS.
Bhansi is one of the two villages of Dantewada district located close to Bailadila hills that has India’s largest stock of world’s finest quality iron ore, and where steel major Essar has planned to install a 3.2 million tonne per annum plant with an investment of Rs.70 billion.
In neighbouring Bijapur district, militants opened fire on a passenger bus and injured two commuters early Monday, police said. The Jagdalpur-bound bus was coming from Bhopalpattanam.
Maoists hold sway in Chhattisgarh’s southern Bastar region where in interior parts rebels have been running a parallel government for at least 25 years.
The mineral-rich state has emerged as the leftist radicals’ terror nerve centre in the past three years. Maoists carried out their biggest-ever assault on a police camp in March this year in Bastar and massacred 55 policemen.