Suspected separatist rebels fatally shot 48 migrant workers and wounded at least 19 others in 10 separate attacks launched late on Friday and early yesterday in India's remote northeast, officials said.
The attacks targeted poor, Hindi-speaking migrants in the state of Assam, and suspicion fell on the rebel United Liberation Front of Asom, which is fighting for an independent homeland for the region's Assamese speaking people, the state's police chief, R.N. Mathur, told reporters.
The shootings were the worst spate of violence in recent years, and raised fears the ULFA was seeking to broaden its insurgency following the breakdown of peace talks last year.
The most lethal attack was yesterday's pre-dawn shooting of 13 workers while they slept in the remote town of Sadiya, 600km east of Assam's capital Gauhati, local administrative officer Absar Hazarika said.
On Friday, 35 people were fatally shot in several incidents in the tea-growing districts of Tinsukia and Dibrugarh, 500km to 600km east of Gauhati, Mathur said. Details on individual attacks were not immediately available.
ULFA has not claimed responsibility for the attacks, although rebel officials don't usually comment on such incidents.
"Intensive operations against the ULFA militants are being carried out jointly by the army, police and paramilitary [forces]," said Mathur, who added the operations were proceeding slowly because of difficult terrain.
Separately, a bomb exploded yesterday on an express train running from New Delhi to the city of Dibrugarh in Assam, but there were no casualties, railway spokesman T. Rabha said. Officials were not sure if the rebels were behind that attack as well.
ULFA, fighting for an independent homeland since 1979, stepped up its violent campaign after the Indian government called off peace talks and a six-week temporary truce in September and resumed military offensives.
At least 10,000 people, most of them civilians, have died in Assam because of fighting between government forces and ULFA, as well as another separatist group, the National Democratic Front of Bodoland.
The northeast has poor infrastructure, widespread unemployment and bitterness toward the central government that has nurtured dozens of militant groups. Alongside Assam's separatists, dozens of other insurgencies are festering in the region's six other states.
The militants say the central government in New Delhi -- 1,600km to the west -- exploits the northeast's rich natural resources while doing little for the region's indigenous people, most of them ethnically closer to Burma and China than to the rest of India.
Migrant workers like the ones attacked on Friday and yesterday, most of them from Bihar, another poor Indian state, are a favorite target of the insurgents.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the