Naxals blame ITBP for kids' death

NAGPUR: Naxals have called a one-day bandh on Saturday in Gadchiroli and Gondia blaming the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP) for the deaths of civilians including three children in Sawargaon last week.
The bandh calls for action against perpetrators of killings of the villagers. While the rebels blamed the security forces for civilian casualties, they maintained silence on why they took shelter in village near school during the skirmish.The mystery about whose shell landed in the ashramshala premises at Sawargaon persists.
The naxals, through a pamphlet traced in Kurkheda tehsil, have claimed it was ITBP's ammunition that landed in the school claiming four lives on the spot and injuring another dozen.
However, that would indicate that Naxals were trying to hide behind ashramshala and using the inmates as human shield thereby endangering their life.
Incidentally, another 13-year-old girl was injured at Kokhegaon in Rajnandgaon district in Chhattisgarh in the same exchange of fire between Naxal and ITBP. The toll, which was initially four, rose to five after another critically injured six-year-old died at a hospital in Nagpur.
A dozen students were left struggling for life without proper medical attention for over eight hours.
The encounter had kicked off after three ITBP jawans were killed and another injured in a mine blast triggered by Naxalites near a bridge close to Sawargaon, which is around a kilometre away from the Maharashtra-Chhattisgarh border.