Top CRPF, police officers visit Narayanpur attack site

Top CRPF and Chhattisgarh police officers today visited the ambush site in Narayanpur district where 27 personnel of the central force were killed by Naxals.

CRPF chief Vikram Srivastava along with senior officials of the state police and the Union Home Ministry also talked to the villagers near the Daurai road area to understand the sequence of events that led to the deadly ambush.

The officials met the troops of the 39th Battalion that had come under the Maoist attack in the afternoon of June 29 and had alerted their base camp about the incident.

A large number of heavily-armed Maoists, perched on a hilltop, had opened fire with automatic weapons on a 63-member security contingent which was returning on foot from road opening duty. The dead included a CRPF Assistant Commandant Jatin Gulati.

The CRPF chief is expected to submit a report about the incident to Home Minister P Chidambaram once he returns to New Delhi.

According to sources, the security forces have gathered credible inputs that the Maoists have buried 15 dead bodies clad in black uniforms -- who have been killed in the retaliatory fire by CRPF men during the ambush -- in the hill slopes a few kilometres from the site at Narayanpur.

A contingent of security forces has been dispatched to recover the bodies, they said.