Chaos reigns in Chaibasa after Naxalite attack

CHAIBASA (West Singhbhum): Confusion reigned supreme at the sleepy district headquarters here on Saturday as the ill-equipped police grappled with the aftermath of worst Naxalite bloodbath that reportedly left 18 policemen dead.
Nobody seemed to have concrete information about the dead as well as the policemen missing, even after almost 48 hours of the bloody encounter between the police and MCC extremists deep inside the Saranda forest near Bettal Soy village under the Manoharpur police station in West Singhbhum district.
Chief minister Babulal Marandi claimed here on Saturday afternoon that not a single police personnel involved in the encounter was missing. Jharkhand DGP R R Prasad, however, admitted that there was no trace of inspector Maloy Ghosh. The Jharkhand Police Association (JPA) feared that about 32 policemen were missing. The district police staff had no "official or unofficial" information on 20 policemen.
The police confirmed the death of 12 policemen, including one inspector and one sub-inspector, and four civilians. There were "unofficial reports" of two more constables succumbing to their injuries.
The plan for search operation in the forest area apparently had not taken off till afternoon, even as the CM vowed to end extremist activities in the state.
The JPA bitterly complained that there was "very little information" on the entire operation. "No one is sure how many policemen actually went for the operation. The wireless network of the district has not been functioning for quite sometime. The state police headquarters at Ranchi virtually had no information till 2 pm on Friday," its president Ramchandra Pandey said.
The survivors reaching here too spewed venom. "Our officers led us right into the death trap. Most of us didn’t want to return by the same route. Even the Orissa DIG (Sunil Roy) asked us not to follow the same path on our return. But the officers forced us to use the same shortcut," a constable said, requesting anonymity.
The senior police officials feel that the police contingent apparently fell into the MCC trap. "The murder of the Bettal Soy village headman and the local forester probably was to ensnare the police," ADG Rameshwar Oraon reasoned. The DGP said, "Something went wrong somewhere. Coming back the same way they had gone was a mistake. We would be probing deeper into the incident."
Nothing really seems to have gone right for the policemen on Thursday evening. The SLRs of many of the jawans had allegedly got "jammed and failed to work," prompting the JPA to dub the recent police modernisation as "farce." It claimed that SLRs rejected by the Army have been supplied to the police. The DGP, however, refuted the charge. Police sources said a recent report sent to the police headquarters had rubbished MCC threat in the area.