Maoist rebels kill 18 in attack on Indian village

At least 18 people, including a former minister's son, were killed overnight when Maoist rebels opened fire on a group of football spectators in eastern India, a police official said Saturday.

Between 30 and 40 heavily armed rebels stormed a village around midnight and opened fire on about 150 people gathered there after a match to watch a local cultural performance, police said.

"Seventeen persons have been killed in the attack," district police superintendent Arun Kumar Singh told AFP in Jharkhand state.

One man died later of a bullet wound, taking the toll to 18, police said, adding that a three-year-old was among the three remaining wounded.

"Intensive combing operations are going on," Singh said, adding that the border with Bihar, the state to the north, had been sealed to prevent rebels from fleeing there.

The night's entertainment was organised by the brother of the former chief minister Babu Lal Marandi, whose son Anup Marandi was in Chilkhari village for the match.

"The police security personnel deployed left the place after the football match," said Singh. "They did wrong. They should have stayed."

The attack echoed the assassination of federal lawmaker Sunil Mahto, who was gunned down by Maoists posing as spectators at a football match in a village in the state in March.

The attackers, including several women, wore fatigues similar to those used by India's anti-terror paramilitary forces and gradually surrounded the unsuspecting crowd before opening fire, witnesses said.

The Maoist insurgency - which grew out of a peasant uprising in eastern India in 1967 - threatens huge swathes of India's centre, east and south and has spread to half of India's 29 states.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last year described them as the single biggest threat to India's internal security, but the Maoists say they are only fighting for the rights of neglected tribal people and landless farmers. Former chief minister Marandi flew on Saturday to the village, which is surrounded by heavy forest and situated 290 kilometres (180 miles) from the state capital Ranchi, but spoke to reporters before he left.

"The government seems to have no idea how to get out of this situation. It is getting worse," said a calm Marandi, who was the first to run the newly-created Jharkhand state when it was carved out of Bihar in 2000.

The left-wing guerrillas of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist) hold sway in 16 of the 19 districts in the mineral-rich state.

AFP, Saturday