Maoist rebels kill 15 elite Indian commandos and driver in fresh election violence
- The team of soldiers was travelling in a private vehicle to inspect an earlier attack when bombing occurred
A bomb attack by suspected Maoist rebels killed 15 Indian elite commandos and their driver on Wednesday, police said, in the latest incident of election-time violence in a decades-long insurgency.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed since the 1960s in several areas of India in clashes between security forces and guerillas first inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong.
In the latest incident, “Maoists attacked a team of commandos travelling in a private vehicle to inspect an earlier attack. So far 16 men have died,” an official at police headquarters in the western state of Maharashtra told AFP.
The attack, the deadliest carried out by the Maoists since 2017, happened in the densely forested Gadchiroli region of Maharashtra, deep in the Indian interior.
Gadchiroli police official Prashant Dute told AFP that the police commandos had been on their way to the scene of the earlier attack in the same area in which more than 30 vehicles were torched.
