Two persons were injured when Naxalites blew up their vehicle using an improvised explosive device (IED) in Chhattisgarh's Bijapur district on Tuesday, police said.
In a separate incident, Naxalites strangled a man while branding him a police spy, also in Bijapur district, the police said.
The explosion took place near Rajpenta village (between Basaguda and Tarrem villages) around 9 am when the two victims were heading towards Tarrem in a multi-utility vehicle (MUV), Superintendent of Police (Bijapur) Kamlochan Kashyap said.
The vehicle was mangled due to the impact of the blast.
The injured were identified as Mohammed Iqbal Ansari, the vehicle owner, and Balram Pradhan, a motor mechanic, the officer said.
According to preliminary information, Ansari was taking Pradhan with him to fix his truck that had stopped near Tarrem due to technical fault, Kashyap said.
A police team admitted the injured to a local hospital, he said.
The police suspect that the rebels might have planned to target security forces but mistakenly attacked the civilian vehicle.
In a separate incident, Maoists killed a resident of Gongla village in the Gangalur police station limits, about 30 km from Bijapur, Kashyap said.
On Monday night the Maoists stormed into the house of Ramlu Vendja in Gangalur and took him away forcibly to a nearby secluded place and strangled him, the SP said, while denying Ramlu’s connections with the police.