By IANS
Raipur : As many as 11 bodies were recovered from a thick jungle pocket in Chhattisgarh’s Bijapur district Saturday, a day after about 200 heavily armed insurgents attacked a 21-member police party, a senior police officer said.
“Now confusion is over. Eleven cops of the 21-member police team were killed in Friday’s ambush while five cops whom we assumed to have also been killed returned safely today and five others returned Friday soon after the attack,” Ratanlal Dangi, Bijapur district superintendent of police, told IANS by telephone.
A majority of the dead belong to the district’s force. The bodies were found strewn in a pool of blood near the site of the attack, a forested hamlet under the Pamed police station, some 350 km from district headquarters Bijapur and close to the Andhra Pradesh border.
“Ten corpses out of the 11 bore multiple bullet marks while one had been repeatedly stabbed by knives,” police department spokesman Rajkumar Devangan told mediapersons.
“Rebels looted self-loading rifles of all the dead cops,” he added.
Chhattisgarh is one of the worst hit among the 13 states affected by radial leftwing violence.
At least 235 people including 105 policemen were killed in the state in 2007.