12 Chhattisgarh cops missing after gunfight with Maoists

Raipur, Dec 20 - At least 12 policemen went missing Thursday in a forested stretch of Chhattisgarh's Dantewada district after a brief gun battle with Maoist insurgents, police said.'Insurgents opened gunfire on a 33-member police team late Thursday at the thick forested hamlet of Taragura under Konta block in Dantewada district,' a top police officer told IANS.'Twenty-one cops returned in two batches while 12 are missing,' the officer said.

The missing cops comprised eight Special Armed Forces (SAF) personnel and four from the District Force (DF).The site of the gun battle was some 500 km south of state capital Raipur, a bastion of the banned Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist).It comes just four days after a group of Maoists successfully engineered a jailbreak in Dantewada, in which 299 inmates included some 100 Maoists escaped.

Indo-Asian News Service