Indian police have arrested a senior Maoist rebel blamed for an attack on a police camp in the east of the country last month that killed 25 people, officials said yesterday.
The man, known by the names Deepak and Venkateswar Reddy, is a close associate of the rebels’ top commander Kishenji, West Bengal government official Raj Kanojia said.
A special police team arrested the 45-year-old Reddy late on Tuesday in Kolkata, capital of West Bengal state.
“Reddy is a key aide of Maoist leader Kishenji,” Kanojia said, adding that intelligence officials had been shadowing him for days.
“He is an explosives expert and we think he had a major role in the Silda attack that claimed the lives of 24 policemen and a civilian in a western district of West Bengal,” Kanojia said, referring to the Feb. 15 attack in Midnapore, in which about 20 rebels attacked a police camp using guns and landmines.
Police at the time described the armed assault as the worst ever by Maoists on security forces in West Bengal.
The Maoists said they were responding to a large-scale government offensive aimed at flushing the outlawed insurgents from their strongholds.
New Dehli considers Maoist rebels to be the country’s biggest internal security threat. The insurgents are estimated to number between 10,000 and 20,000 and are predominantly active in a large swathe of the country from the north and east — called the “Red Corridor.”
The Maoist insurgency began as a peasant uprising in 1967 and has now spread to 20 of India’s 29 states. They claim to be fighting for the rights of impoverished tribal people and other victims of state violence.
The government has offered talks, but only if the Maoists, renounce violence. Kishenji last week told local media that the guerrillas were ready for talks if the government suspended their offensive.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS