Police declare 4 Bastar villagers injured after Maoists used them as human shields

New particulars about final week’s encounter in Chhattisgarh’s Abujhmad have emerged with the police claiming on Tuesday that the Naxals had used villagers, together with minors, in an unsuccessful bid to avoid wasting the lifetime of their senior cadre, Karthik.

Karthik was amongst seven Naxals killed within the encounter on December 12 and at the very least 4 civilians sustained bullet accidents, the police stated.

On December 12, in an encounter between Maoists and safety forces within the forest hills of Kalhaja-Dondarbera of south Abujhmad space, the our bodies of seven armed uniformed Maoists comprising 5 males and two girls had been recovered together with weapons, These included Karthik alias Dasru, who was their Odisha State Committee member and was carrying a reward of ₹25 lakh, stated a senior police officer.

“In accordance with preliminary data, the villagers had been saved collectively to hold the products of the Naxalites and through the encounter, beneath the quilt of those villagers, the safety forces had been fired upon during which it was reported that 4 villagers had been injured,” a police assertion issued on Tuesday night learn, including that extra data was being collected concerning the incident.

The operation was carried out by personnel from the District Reserve Guard (DRG) from Kondagaon, Bastar, Narayanpur and Dantewada, together with the State’s Particular Activity Pressure (STF) and Central Reserve Police Pressure (CRPF). They proceeded after receiving details about the presence of Maoists in Abujhmad, a dense and enormous forested space masking the districts of Bijapur, Dantewada and Narayanpur.

A senior police officer stated that that they had acquired details about many extra Maoists getting injured within the encounter they usually had been being handled by the Maoists within the surrounding forest space and had been within the technique of verifying the identical.

Over the previous one yr, there was an uptick within the operations carried out by safety forces within the conflict-affected Bastar area. In his latest go to to the State that concluded on Monday, Union Dwelling Minister Amit Shah stated Naxalism, a serious inner safety problem concentrated largely in Chhattisgarh, can be eradicated by March 2026.