7 polling staff, 5 CRPF men killed in twin Naxal blasts in Chhattisgarh
In an audacious post-poll attack, at least 14 people, including polling officials and security personnel, were killed on Saturday when their vehicles were blown up in two separate Naxal strikes in Chhattisgarh, officials said. The Naxals struck just two days after polling finished in Chhattisgarh’s Bastar lok Sabha constituency.
A bus in which 12 polling officials were returning was blown to bits by a Naxal landmine in Bijapur district. Six polling officials were killed on the spot and six others were injured. One of them died of his injuries later, taking the number of officials killed in the blast to seven.
The attack took place around noon near Ketulnar Village. The second attack also took place around noon in Bastar district, targeting five Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) troopers, part of the 80th battalion’s road opening party, travelling in an ambulance.
The ambulance was blown up in a landmine blast in Darbha Valley. The five troopers, the ambulance’s driver and one technician were killed in the blast.
“Both the blasts were very powerful and were remote controlled. Body parts were seen scattered all around the attack site,” local authorities and tribal residents who were the first to rush to the site, told The Pioneer.
Reacting to the tragedy, Chief Election Commissioner VS Sampath said in Chennai that the Election Commission would stand by the families of the victims. Sampath said: “It is a very unfortunate incident and in the run up to the polls, in many places like Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, a lot of precautions have to be taken by the polling staff when they go to the polling station.” Chief Minister Raman Singh termed the incident “extremely outrageous.”
“It’s an attack on humanity, it’s very shameful that unarmed people who were sent on poll duty have been killed. This is for the first time that an emergency medical ambulance was targeted in Chhattisgarh. I can’t understand the logic of such mindless killings,’’ Singh said in his first reaction in Kanker where he was addressing an election rally when the news of the twin blasts broke.
Giving the sequence of events, RK Vij, Additional Director-General of Police (anti-Naxal operations), said that in the first blast in Bijapur district, the Naxals blew up a private bus in which the seven polling party members were killed.
The poll personnel were returning after holding the election at Kutru area in Bastar lok Sabha constituency.The rebels fled deeper into the forest after security personnel launched a retaliatory attack. Reinforcements were rushed to the spot soon after getting the news of the incident and the victims were retrieved from the dense forest, he said.
A police official said that around 75-100 armed rebels were involved in the ambush on the polling team. After triggering a landmine blast, the Naxals opened indiscriminate firing on the bus. Meanwhile, Chief Electoral Officer Sunil Kujur said some ballot units of the EVM machines possessed by the polling officials were damaged in the mishap. However, the control unit of those EVMs has already been shifted to the district headquarter, he added.
Within an hour after the first attack, the rebels struck again and the second blast targeted the Sanjeevani Express, an emergency medical ambulance, which the CRPF jawans boarded near Darbha Valley. The ambulance was blown into pieces on the Jagdalpur-Sukma National Highway 30.
Vij said that out of the ten CRPF men of the 80th battalion who boarded the ambulance defying standard operating procedure, five were killed on the spot. The driver and a technician of the ambulance were also killed. Four polling staff who suffered injuries in the Bijapur blast and four CRPF men who were injured in the Darbha Valley blast were airlifted to Raipur and admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of a private hospital.
According to a senior police official, the CRPF personnel were heading towards Jagdalpur district headquarter after a security operation in the region for the movement of polling teams. Some of them took lift in the ambulance ahead of Kamnar.
Naxals were apparently keeping a watch on the movement of the security forces following which they targeted the vehicle, he said. The slain CRPF personnel have been identified as Inspector M K Rai, Assistant Sub-Inspector Kanti Bhai, Head Constable’s Sitaram and M Umesh, Constable Dinesh and the civilian driver Vasu Sethiya.
The voting for Bastar constituency was held on Thursday and the Naxals had failed to disrupt the polling, but two days later now the guerrillas managed to trigger blasts to make their presence felt in the region which has been hit by leftist militancy since the late 1980s.
The brutal killing of the polling personnel and security men created an outrage in the State and several State Government employees held a demonstration at the district collectorate in Raipur accusing the authorities of providing inadequate security to the polling staff who were sent to the Naxal-commanded areas of Bastar for holding the elections.