Photographs of dead Maoists killed by Indian security forces being carried “animal-like” hanging from bamboo sticks have prompted an official reproach from the home ministry, reports said yesterday.
The pictures, published on Thursday after an attack by security forces on a Maoist camp in the east of the country showed women with hands and feet bound to poles as they were carried from nearby forested areas.
“The way those bodies were being carried was simply inhuman,” a senior official in the ministry of home affairs told the Express newspaper.
The unnamed official said carrying bodies with bamboo poles might be necessary in jungle areas where Maoist camps are found, “but once they come out of the forest area, they should use stretchers to carry bodies.”
Local paramilitary forces and the police have been told to treat the dead with more dignity, the official said.
Indian security forces killed 12 Maoists, including three women, in a gunfight late on Wednesday in the latest of a series of raids against rebel strongholds in the east of country.
The government launched a major offensive last year to tackle the worsening left-wing insurgency, which critics say is leading to human rights violations and civilian deaths.
Since the start of the offensive, the Maoists have hit back with their own bloody strikes including the massacre of 76 policemen in April and the derailment of a train that killed 146.
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