By IANS,
Raipur: The reported massacre of eight members of a family, including two minor girls, over a property dispute in a Chhattisgarh village was a fake complaint, intended to lure security personnel into a Maoist ambush, police said Friday.
“None of the eight people of a family was killed, we confirmed earlier. A man narrated a pathetic story about how and where Maoists wiped out his entire family Tuesday in an interior village of Kanker district and then also cremated their bodies,” state Director General of Police (DGP) Vishwa Rranjan told reporters.
He said police reached the village Friday and found four members of the family and took two of them to a local police station, where they were interrogated. It was found that the whole massacre story was fabricated to make policemen rush to the crime scene so that Maoists could ambush them.
Ramain Vishwakarma had Wednesday said he walked barefoot through several km of hilly, forested areas Wednesday evening to report that his eight family members were butchered by Maoists Tuesday as he defied their diktat to settle a family land dispute.
On the basis of the complaint, the DGP was quick to announce that Maoists had massacred eight people. Chief Minister Raman Singh condemned the incident and asked the DGP to arrest the killers and punish them for committing a heinous crime.
Vishwakarma, whom the police are now suspecting to be a Maoist informer, belongs to Kesikodi village that comes under Maoists-controlled Abujhmad region, known as headquarters of the banned outfit Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist).
Kanker police chief Ajay Yadav, who had maintained that police could only confirm the incident only after reaching the spot, said Friday that police would have suffered heavy casualties if they had reacted to massacre complaint urgently, as it was intended to take security personnel to jungles where Maoists were probably waiting to ambush them.