 | Wars in the World |
Daily News on Wars in the World and on New States
| FOLLOW US ON: FACEBOOK X FLIPBOARD TELEGRAM |
Maoist rebels yesterday shot dead a senior paramilitary officer in a fresh gun battle just one week after they killed 24 people, including Congress politicians, in an ambush.
Security forces have been engaged in a long-running and bloody conflict with the outlawed Maoists in central India.
“When a police party was on a combing operation (looking for rebels), Maoists sprayed bullets on them,” police inspector general Ashok Juneja said.
Myanmar has reached a preliminary ceasefire agreement with ethnic Kachin rebels, the last major armed group to agree to stop fighting after decades of civil war.
Min Zaw Oo, negotiator and director of the EU-funded Myanmar Peace Center, said Kachin and Myanmar government representatives had signed a seven-point plan which included the halting of hostilities.
“I think we have achieved a breakthrough,” he said.
Still reeling from a bloody encounter with the Abu Sayyaf group in the south that claimed the lives of seven Marine soldiers over the weekend, the government’s law enforcers suffered another major blow Monday with the killing of eight Special Action Force (SAF) policemen in a guerrilla ambush in the northern province of Cagayan.
Seven other members of the Philippine National Police’s elite SAF team were wounded in an ambush by communist New People’s Army (NPA) rebels early Monday.
Just two days earlier, on Saturday, seven Philippine Marines were killed in a clash with Abu Sayyaf bandits in Patikul town in Sulu. Officials are still trying to determine if the incident was an “operational miscalculation” or a close encounter.
A heavily-armed gang of nearly 300 Maoist rebels killed at least 24 people in an attack on a convoy of local Congress party leaders and supporters in central India, police said Sunday.
The land mine and gun attack on Saturday was the deadliest in three years, and the latest in a long-simmering conflict that pits the insurgents against authorities in the forests of mainly central and eastern India.
Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, who rushed to the Chhattisgarh state capital Raipur along with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after the ambush, condemned what she called a “cowardly act” by the Maoists.
At least seven Filipino marines and four Abu Sayyaf bandits were killed in a clash Saturday as the military launched an offensive against al-Qaeda-linked gunmen who have been blamed for recent kidnappings and of trying to sabotage a road project in the island province of Sulu, military officials said Saturday.
Nine other marines and about 10 Abu Sayyaf fighters were wounded in the gunbattle that broke around 6:40 a.m. Saturday and raged for an hour in the village of Tugas, Patikul municipality, military spokesman Brigade General Domingo Tutaan said.