By IANS
Lima : Seven suspected rebels of the Shining Path terror group have been killed in a clash with the army in the Peruvian jungle province of Huanta, the armed forces joint command said.
The firefight started around noon Tuesday when the army’s counter-insurgency battalion came in contact with the suspected insurgents, Spanish news agency EFE reported Thursday.
Defence Minister Allan Wagner confirmed the clash, but said there was no additional information beyond what had been provided by the joint command.
“It occurred in the area of the VRAE (Valley of the Apurimac and Ene rivers), where there are terrorist elements,” Wagner was quoted as saying by EFE.
The Shining Path, which is the popular name of the Communist Party of Peru, is a guerrilla outfit founded by Abimael Guzman, a professor of philosophy at San Cristobal University, in 1980 to carry out armed struggle to seize power.
The group launched its rebellion on May 17, 1980, with an attack in Chuschi, a small town in the southern province of Ayacucho. The movement effectively collapsed in 1992 with the arrest of Guzman who by that time had acquired an iconic status for all the wrong reasons.
The remaining active units of the Shining Path are operating in Peru’s central jungle region, led by Artemio, the only remaining high-profile fugitive of the group that terrorised this Andean nation in the 1980s. In August this year, nine members of the group were arrested in the jungle province of Leoncio Prado.
Artemio leads a force, which calls itself Proseguir, comprising 200-300 insurgents, who terrorise the inhabitants living in the jungles, who grow coca leaves, the raw material of cocaine.
A truth commission appointed by former president Alejandro Toledo blamed the Shining Path for most of the nearly 70,000 deaths that occurred in the country. According to the commission estimates, it also caused economic losses worth about $25 billion.