By IANS
Patna : At least nine people, including seven policemen, were killed when a large number of Maoist guerrillas attacked a police station and a smaller police post in rural Bihar, shooting some of the victims after they surrendered.
In near simultaneous attacks, a group of 200 men in green fatigues and armed with a variety of weapons surrounded the police station at Rajpur in Rohtas district, about 150 km from here, while another 100 rebels targeted the police post in Baghela, just three kilometres away.
There were just eight policemen at the Rajpur police station, and reports from the area said they put up some resistance before surrendering to the guerrillas. But the attackers shot them, killing four policemen and seriously injuring four more.
For the first time in the history of Bihar's Maoist movement, the guerrillas used "petrol bombs" to frighten and overwhelm the policemen, officials and media reports said. The bombs set the police station on fire.
Several civilians were also reportedly injured in the attack, but it was not clear how. The injured were later taken to a hospital in Varanasi in the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh.
"The rebels cordoned the police station and asked our men to hand over their arms and ammunition," a despondent police official said in Sasaram town, which is the headquarters of Rohtas district.
The victorious Maoists left the site with arms and ammunition, including four self-loading rifles, eight .303 rifles, two INSAS rifles and three carbines besides hundreds of rounds of ammunition belonging to the police.
And to prevent reinforcements from rushing in, the Maoists bombed three road bridges in the area, a police official said.
The Saturday night attacks were the second major strike by Maoists since they stormed the Jehanabad jail in November 2005 and forcibly freed 340 prisoners in an operation that stunned and shamed the Bihar government.
In Patna, Chief Minister Nitish Kumar held a high level meeting while two associations of policemen squarely blamed the police brass and the government for the alarming situation in Bihar's rural areas where Maoists dominate.
"The constabulary is getting killed and the government merely pays lip service to modernization of the police force," said the Bihar Policemen's Association in Patna. "They have no strategy to fight the Maoists."
K.K. Jha of the Bihar Police Association also said that the government had no policy to battle the guerrillas even though the Maoist movement in Bihar is four decades old.
Police officials here said that security forces, including central paramilitary personnel, had been sent to Rohtas to hunt down the attackers.
In April, Maoist militants launched simultaneous attacks on the police station, block office and a bank branch at Riga in Sitamarhi district.