By IANS
Raipur : Twelve policemen were missing after a gun battle with Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district Wednesday, and authorities feared they were dead as search operations have failed to discover their whereabouts.
“We have no reports at all about the 12 cops though several search parties are making the best efforts in thick forested and hilly stretches of Dantewada to locate them,” Inspector General (Maoist operation) Girdhari Nayak told IANS by phone late Wednesday night.
“Dantewada District Superintendent of Police Rahul Sharma and several other senior officers are still near the encounter site to trace the missing cops,” the official added.
The twelve policemen, a majority of them special police officers (SPOs) and Chhattisgarh Armed Forces (CAF) personnel, went missing after a fierce gun battle with rebels in the afternoon in a forested pocket in an interior belt, Tadmetla, in Dantewada district, about 500 km south of capital Raipur.
Nayak informed: “The gun battle broke out when two separate police platoons numbering 40 cops went to the thick forested area of Tadmetla for road opening. Fire-fighting began when rebels attacked one of the search teams from behind, injuring six cops.”
He added that at least an hour after the gun battle that ended around 4 p.m., 28 cops had returned to the camp in phases.
A police officer who was part of the road opening parties told IANS by phone that a majority of the missing cops had received multiple bullet wounds in the gun battle.
On July 9, 24 policemen including 16 from Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed in the same district in a similar fire fight.