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Rebels suspected of killing workers

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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.
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