By IANS
Raipur : Police search squads Thursday recovered the bodies of the 12 policemen a day after they went missing following a fierce shootout with Maoist militants in a forested hamlet of Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district.
The slain policemen were part of a 40-member road-opening deployment that had gone into the interiors of Dantewada district’s Tadmetla area Wednesday afternoon and fought an hour-long battle with armed Maoists some 500 km south of the capital Raipur.
Police say about 200 Maoists were involved in the attack on the policemen. The rebels also looted self-loading rifles (SLRs) from the slain cops.
“We have recovered bullet-ridden dead bodies of all the 12 missing cops close to the encounter site,” R.K. Vij, inspector general (Bastar range), told IANS by phone.
“The deceased included eight special police officers (SPOs), three Chhattisgarh Armed Forces (CAF) jawans and Hemant Kumar, a station house officer (SHO) at the Jagargunda police station,” he added.
Inspector General (Maoist operation) Girdhari Nayak told IANS: “The gun battle broke out when two separate police platoons numbering 40 cops went to Tadmetla for road opening. The fire fighting began when rebels attacked one of the search teams from behind, injuring six cops.”
At the end of the gun-battle ended at around 4 p.m., 28 policemen managed to return to the base camp but 12 of their colleagues remained untraceable.
On July 9, 24 policemen including 16 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel were killed in a similar shootout in the same district.
Chhattisgarh’s mineral rich Bastar region, comprising five districts of Kanker, Narayanpur, Bijapur, Bastar and Dantewada, has emerged as the nerve centre of Maoist operations in India since June 2005, when locals launched a civil militia movement – called Salwa Judum – that has forced over 50,000 people to flee from their homes and settle in government-run camps due to threats from Maoists.