Police said they killed a top Maoist rebel leader in a shootout on Friday, but the insurgents accused authorities of killing him in custody.| Either way he's dead ... |
As part of their campaign to drive back the rebels, police said they battled on Friday with the Maoists in the Jogapur forest area in the neighbouring southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Cherukuri Rajkumar, also known as Azad, was killed, said top police official Ps Pramod Kumar.
But in a telephone call to journalists on Friday, Gudsa Usendi, a spokesman for the Maoists, accused police of killing Azad in custody after capturing him a day earlier in the forest, nearly 200 miles (300 kilometers) north of Hyderabad. The rebels, who call themselves the Communist Party of India (Maoist), say the late Chinese communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong inspired them.
They have tapped into the rural poor's growing anger at being left out of the country's economic gains and are now present in 20 of India's 28 states. They have an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 fighters.
India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the rebels the country's greatest "internal security threat."