With no contact with the outside world for almost three-and-a-half hours, the company belonging to CRPF’s 62nd battalion haplessly stood as hordes of Maoist swept down.
The 84-member CRPF team that was ambushed by Maoists in the Sukma block of Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district on Tuesday had left its camp in the Mukrana jungle at sunrise around 5 am on routine patrol.
Ten of them returned in the evening, badly injured and horrified by the slaughter of their 74 colleagues in the wilderness. The 75th casualty was a police constable.
With no contact with the outside world for almost three-and-a-half hours, the company belonging to CRPF’s 62nd battalion haplessly stood as hordes of Maoist swept down.
The full extent of the horror is yet to emerge, but a combination of strategic blunders, lack of intelligence and the savagery of naxal revolution are evident. Emerging clearly from the fog of war is the bravery of a constable, who escaped the attack and ran for one-and-a-half hours to reach a place where he could get mobile connectivity to report the bloodbath to his superior.
It was his call around 8.15 am, giving details of at least 25 bodies he had counted, that alerted security agencies and helped in assistance reaching the thick jungle almost three-and-a-half hours later.
The attack took place at around 6 am. Maoists carried out several explosions using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to trap the jawans, and followed it up with indiscriminate firing from the top of a hill that surrounded the CRPF company’s path. A truck carrying medical supplies for the injured was blown up, forcing the rescue team to walk 6 km to reach the site of the attack, but the truck was taken so that the injured could be loaded and rushed to hospital.
“Our men don’t travel by trucks or jeeps in jungles because of IEDs. Otherwise, the toll would have been even more,” a senior home ministry official said.
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