Suspected rebels woke up sleeping villagers in northeastern India and opened fire with automatic weapons, killing six of them and raising the death toll to 63 from three days of violence in a region where dozens of ethnic rebel groups are fighting for separate homelands.
Seven people were wounded when the group of heavily armed militants descended on Gelapukhuri, a village 210km north of Gauhati, the capital of Assam state, said police officer P. Baruah, who was reached from the region by telephone.
The rebels shot four of the villagers to death instantly, Baruah said. Nine wounded were rushed to a local hospital, where two succumbed to their injuries, he said.
Baruah blamed the National Democratic Front of Boroland (NDFB) for the attack, the latest in a spasm of violence that claimed 57 lives over the weekend, when suspected rebels bombed utilities, a tea plantation and a crowded marketplace.
Meanwhile, shops and schools were closed and most traffic halted in parts of Assam state yesterday during a dawn-to-dusk strike called by a students' group to protest the killings, said A. K. Bhutani, the district magistrate of Kokrajhar, which was hit by several bomb and gunfire attacks over the weekend.
The All Bodo Students' Union, a tribal student group, called for the general strike in seven of the state's 27 districts where it commands support. The group had helped broker a peace accord between the federal government and an insurgent group, the Bodo Liberation Tigers, in western Assam last year.
At least 18 bombings and shootings have been carried out in Nagaland and Assam states since Saturday. The attacks -- particularly an explosion on Saturday that ripped through a railway station full of commuters -- angered some separatist leaders.
A leader of one separatist group, the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) has been quoted as taking responsibility for some of the attacks.
No arrests have been made, police said. Assam's top police official has blamed all of the attacks on two militant groups -- the NDFB and the ULFA.
"The entire string of attacks was a joint operation by the ULFA and the NDFB," Inspector-General Khagen Sarma said.
On Sunday, the elusive commander in chief of the outlawed ULFA, Paresh Barua, claimed responsibility for four of the attacks in Assam state, where the group has been fighting for a separate homeland since 1979 in an insurgency that has left more than 10,000 dead in the past decade.
"This is our answer to Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi's cease-fire call," the English-language newspaper The Sentinel quoted Barua as saying.
Government officials last week offered a ceasefire to both militant groups, and asked for a response before Oct. 15.
Sunday was the 18th anniversary of the founding of the NDFB, which is demanding a homeland for Boroland, a region that straddles Nagaland and Assam states. Nearly 40 separatist groups have been fighting in the mountainous region of multiple ethnicities wedged between Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar.
Rebels in Nagaland have been leading one of Asia's longest running separatist conflicts, dating to shortly before India gained independence from Britain in 1947. Some 15,000 people have been kil-led in the fighting.
But one Naga separatist group engaged in talks with the government denounced the attacks, and said it was launching its own investigation into the violence. Kraibo Chawang, of the separatist National Socialist Council of Nagaland, said that the assaults were "aimed at derailing and sabotaging our peace talks with the Indian government."
RSS