12 Maoists gunned down in Chhattisgarh encounter

At least a dozen Maoists were gunned down in a fierce, 11-hour encounter in a forest in Bijapur district’s Gangaloor region, taking the number of Maoists killed this year to 103, including 29 in a single operation in Kanker.
All security personnel in the operation are safe, said officers, adding that automatic weapons, a grenade launcher, and explosives were seized from the encounter zone. The Maoists’ bodies were being taken to a police camp for identification. The toll may rise as the exact number of deaths will be known when separate teams of security personnel converge at a place, an officer said. The operation was launched based on specific inputs about the presence of commander-ranked Maoists and over 150 cadres in the region, police said. Over 1,000 security personnel - drawn from CoBRA, Special Task Force, and District Reserve Guards units in multiple districts - set out from different camps of Bijapur, Dantewada and Sukma districts, said officers.
The security forces converged in a patch of dense forest near Pidiya village, around 40 km from Bijapur and 470 km south of Raipur. Police said Maoists fired the first shots, and the forces retaliated. For 11 hours, gunfights erupted at different locations in the forest as security personnel pursued the Maoists. The combat continued even after darkness fell. Dantewada SP Gaurav Rai confirmed that bodies of 12 Maoists had been found at the encounter site.