Maoist attack on police camp repulsed

Raipur, March 15 (IANS) A group of heavily armed Maoists opened fire early Saturday on a special police officers (SPOs) camp in Chhattisgarh’s insurgency-hit Dantewada district, but the attack was repulsed by the alert personnel. Superintendent of Police Rahul Sharma said the rebels opened indiscriminate fire on the Chitalanka camp at around 1 a.m. The Maoists, numbering around two dozen, assumed the SPOs to be unarmed and sleeping, but the SPOs opened fire quickly. Within 10 minutes, backup forces reached the camp and repulsed the attack.

The camp housing about 20-25 SPOs is located at village Chitalanka, some 2 km from district headquarters Dantewada town and very close to the district collector and superintendent of police bungalows.

“It was a planned major attack, but alert SPOs repulsed the attack,” Rahul Sharma told newspersons at Dantewada, some 380 km south of capital Raipur. He added that extra forces were deployed in and around the Chitalanka camp.

Dantewada and its neighbouring Bijapur districts are known to be strongholds of Maoists for about three decades. In forest interiors, Maoists run a parallel government and regularly carry out major attacks on civilians and police force bases.

In March last year, rebels massacred 55 policemen in an attack on a police post in Bijapur’s Rani Bodli village. It is considered as the biggest ever attack by Maoists on police installations in the country.