Maoists blow up bus in Chhattisgarh, 35 dead (Second Lead)

RAIPUR - At least 35 special police officers (SPOs) and civilians were killed when Maoist guerrillas blew up a bus in a forested stretch in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district, the same region where they slaughtered 76 security personnel over a month ago.

The bus flew about 20 feet in the air and toppled, killing most of its about 55 occupants, when the Maoists detonated a lethal improvised explosive device on a metalled road linking Dantewada and Sukma towns, about 450 km south of state capital Raipur.

The first locals and policemen who rushed to the site told IANS on telephone that the deafening blast created a 10-feet crater around which bloodied and mangled bodies were scattered.

Many damaged automatic weapons, obviously carried by the SPOs, also lay besides the bodies, which were later carried away by sombre looking police personnel in battle fatigues.

While Chhattisgarh Special Director General of Police Vijay Raman told NDTV television channel that up to 50 people were killed, Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh put the toll at 35 dead. Of this, he said, 20-25 were SPOs and the rest civilians including women and children.

The SPOs are drawn from the local community to take on the Maoists.

“The bus has been completely destroyed. It is difficult to make out even its shape,” one of the locals told IANS. “We can see 20 to 30 bodies. They are lying all around the site.”

Raman Singh, who denounced the attack as “barbaric”, said the front portion of the bus was ripped apart. He said he would discuss the security situation in his state with Manmohan Singh.

The driver of the bus was a civilian. The attack occurred after 4 p.m. when it was only nine kilometres from Sukma town.

In New Delhi, Home Secretary G.K. Pillai denounced the Maoists for targeting civilians.

“Today we have seen the wanton disregard for life. The Maoists have blown up a civilian bus, where the majority of the passengers were tribals and innocent civilians. It so happened we had 15-20 SPOs also on that bus,” he said.

“This is a new dimension. I can only say that the targeting of civilians shows the Maoists are desperate.”

It was the worst attack blamed on the outlawed Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) since 76 security personnel were slaughtered, also in Dantewada district, April 6.

All but one person killed then were from the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), whose men came under attack from three sides by Maoists who lay in ambush.

U.K. Bansal, Special Secretary for Internal Security in the central home ministry, underlined that passengers in the bus were “partly civilians and partly SPOs. It’s extremely unfortunate, a dastardly attack”.

The latest attack prompted a meeting between the prime minister and Home Minister P. Chidambaram, who had offered to resign after the April 6 massacre.

The place where the attack took place is part of the sprawling Bastar region, which is heavily forested and populated mainly by tribals, who are the mainstay of the Maoist movement.

The CPI-Maoist, which has called for a two-day shutdown in five states starting Tuesday, has turned Bastar into its stronghold deploying hundreds of armed cadres.