Revolt Shaked North East India

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
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44 killed, 118 wounded in attacks in northeast India

GUWAHATI, India (AFP) - At least 44 people were killed and 118 wounded in a series of bloody attacks across revolt-racked northeast India, police and officials said.

Some 26 people were killed and 86 wounded in three nearly simultaneous bomb blasts Saturday morning in Dimapur, Nagaland’s commercial hub, in what a top official called the “worst ever terrorist strike” in the tiny state’s history.
Gunmen in neighbouring Assam state later killed 15 villagers and injured a dozen more, police said.

“There were limbs everywhere and blood was splattered all over,” said student leader T. Zheviho who was at crowded Dimapur railway station where one bomb exploded as passengers awaited a train.
Two other bombs went off in the Hong Kong market, which sells Chinese goods, and an adjacent market.

“I had a miraculous escape,” Zheviho told AFP by telephone from Dimapur, 70 kilometers (45 miles) east of Nagaland capital Kohima.
Police said the plastic explosive RDX appeared to have been used in the railway blast that created a huge crater beside a platform.
“We found a briefcase with fuse wires… it contained RDX and a timer-device,” V. Peseyie, Dimapur additional police chief, said.
Seventeen more people were killed in a wave of attacks in neighbouring Assam, police said.
Unidentified attackers raked shoppers with gunfire at a marketplace in Makri Jhora village, 290 kilometres (180 miles) west of Assam’s main city of Guwahati, killing 11 and injuring about a dozen, police said.

The same gunmen later shot dead four more villagers in a nearby forest, police superintendent L.R. Bishnoi told AFP. Two more people were killed and 10 injured in two blasts in the Assamese district of
Bongaingaon, 220 kilometres (136 miles) from Guwahati, Bishnoi said.
One person was killed and seven wounded in an earlier bomb blast in Assam. Police also reported two other bombings in a village on the outskirts of Guwahati in which four people were injured.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the day of bloodshed in the insurgency-infested northeast where some 30 guerrilla groups are battling for greater autonomy or independence.
The attacks occurred as India marked the 135th anniversary of the birth of Mahatma Gandhi who waged a campaign of non-violence to free the country from British rule.

“It is distressing such violence broke out on the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in the capital New Delhi.

Nagaland’s ill-equipped hospitals battled to treat the wounded.

“Many have multiple face and abdomen wounds. They’re in a state of trauma. We’re trying to cope. We’ve never had such a devastating emergency,” said doctor T. Lotha at a private hospital in Dimapur treating blast victims.

Nagaland Chief Minister Neibhiu Rio said at least 26 people were killed in the Dimapur blasts and another 86 were in hospital. “The death toll may go up as many are in a very critical condition,” he said.
“This is the worst ever terrorist strike in Nagaland. People are still dealing with the shock – they’re not yet thinking about who to blame.”

Mourners crowded churches across Nagaland, which is mostly Christian, to pray for the victims. The bomb attacks shattered the relative calm of the mainly farming state of two million where a truce has been in effect with Nagaland’s largest separatist group, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), since 1997.

New Delhi and the NSCN have been holding talks aimed ending nearly six decades of insurgency in the state. Two rival factions of the NSCN denied involvement in the blasts.

The blasts were the second major burst of violence in the northeast since mid-August. Fifteen people, many of them children, were killed in a rebel attack on an Independence Day parade in Assam August 15 for which the United Liberation Front of Asom claimed responsibility.

More than 50,000 people have died in the northeast in over half a century of fighting between security forces and rebel groups, who say their cultures and the region’s resources are under threat from outsiders.

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with the improvemnt in the relations ship with china these things can
be controlled by joint working of china and india

Indian troops mark China festival

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^China Helping India to counter Naga & Assamese Separatists???But why???

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New Attack Kills Six More in India Strife

Mon Oct 4, 2:58 AM ET World - AP Asia

By WASBIR HUSSAIN, Associated Press Writer
GAUHATI, India - Suspected rebels woke up sleeping villagers in northeastern India and fired on them with automatic weapons early Monday, killing six and raising the death toll to 63 from three days of violence in a region where dozens of ethnic rebel groups are fighting for separate homelands.
Seven people also were wounded when the group of heavily armed militants descended on Gelapukhuri, a village 130 miles north of Gauhati, the capital of Assam state, said police officer P. Baruah, who was reached from the region by telephone. Six of the villagers died, he said. Baruah blamed the National Democratic Front of Boroland, or NDFB, for the attack, the latest in a spasm of violence that claimed 57 lives on Saturday and Sunday, when suspected rebels bombed utilities, a tea plantation and a crowded marketplace.
Meanwhile, shops and schools were closed and most traffic halted in parts of Assam state on Monday during a dawn-to-dusk strike called by a students’ group to protest the killings, said A. K. Bhutani, the district magistrate of Kokrajhar, which was hit by several bomb and gunfire attacks over the weekend. The All Bodo Students’ Union, a tribal student group, called for the general strike in seven of the state’s 27 districts where it commands support. The group had helped broker a peace accord between the federal government and an insurgent group, the Bodo Liberation Tigers, in western Assam in 2003.
At least 18 bombings and shootings were carried out in Nagaland and Assam states since Saturday. The attacks — particularly an explosion Saturday that ripped through a railway station full of commuters — angered some separatist leaders. A leader of one separatist group, the United Liberation Front of Asom, or ULFA, has been quoted as taking responsibility for some of the attacks. No arrests have been made, police said. Assam’s top police official has blamed all of the attacks on the two militant groups. “The entire string of attacks was a joint operation by the ULFA and the NDFB,” Inspector-General Khagen Sarma told The Associated Press.
On Sunday, the elusive commander in chief of the outlawed ULFA, Paresh Barua, claimed responsibility for four of the attacks in Assam state, where the group has been fighting for a separate homeland since 1979 in an insurgency that has left more than 10,000 dead in the past decade. “This is our answer to Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi’s cease-fire call,” the English-language newspaper The Sentinel quoted Barua as saying. Government officials last week offered a cease-fire to both militant groups, and asked for a response before Oct. 15. Sunday was the 18th anniversary of the founding of the NDFB, which is demanding a homeland for Boroland, a region that straddles Nagaland and Assam states.
Nearly 40 separatist groups have been fighting in the mountainous region of multiple ethnicities wedged between Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar. Rebels in Nagaland have been leading one of Asia’s longest running separatist conflicts, dating to shortly before India gained independence from Britain in 1947. Some 15,000 people have been killed in the fighting. But one Naga separatist group engaged in talks with the government denounced the attacks, and said it was launching its own investigation into the violence.
Kraibo Chawang, of the separatist National Socialist Council of Nagaland, told the AP that the assaults were “aimed at derailing and sabotaging our peace talks with the Indian government.” Nagaland’s death toll stood at 28, while Assam’s rose Monday to 35.

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India orders extra troops to violence-wracked northeast

Mon Oct 4, 4:24 AM ET South Asia - AFP

GUWAHATI, India (AFP) - India ordered extra troops to its troubled northeastern states in a bid to stem a wave of rebel-linked violence which has killed 69 people and injured 210 in the past three days.

The announcement followed a fresh burst of violence early Monday when suspected rebels of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB) lined up a group of villagers in Assam state’s Sonitpur district, some 180 kilometres (112 miles) from the main city of Guwahati and o
pened fire. Police said six people died and nine were wounded in the attack, which followed a string of rebel-linked bombings and gunfire attacks in Assam and Nagaland states at the weekend.

India’s Home Minister Shivraj Patil, after a two-day tour of the flashpoints, promised Monday to send more troops to the region.
“We have instructed additional paramilitary and army columns to be despatched to Assam following a request from local government,” he told reporters at Guwahati airport before flying back to Delhi.

The bloodletting coincides with the 18th anniversary of the founding of the NDFB, one of around 30 rebel groups fighting for greater autonomy or independence in the region. Patil said New Delhi was open to talks with the rebel groups "although we are committed to taking very strong measures to deal with the spurt in violence. “Let the militant groups come and talk to us, we are prepared to discuss all issues,” he said.

Patil also called for closer inter-state coordination among the troops battling militancy in the northeast and sought the help of locals to deal with militancy, which officials say is aimed at disrupting the peace process underway in the northeast. Civilians are often the targets of the attacks, with the violence Saturday being characterised by three near-simultaneous bomb explosions at a railway station and in two markets in Nagaland’s commercial hub Dimapur that killed 50 people.

On Sunday, rebel groups again targetted crowded markets in the region, leaving a further 10 people dead and scores wounded. Monday’s pre-dawn attack was also aimed at civilians. “The NDFB rebels woke up sleeping villagers and asked them to line up and started firing at them with automatic weapons,” a police official told AFP. “Six people died on the spot and nine more were seriously injured.”

Police had earlier reported three rebels killed while trying to plant explosive devices which went off prematurely. The attacks have shattered the relative calm of mainly agricultural Nagaland, where a truce has been in force with the region’s largest separatist group, the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN), since 1997.

New Delhi and the NSCN have been holding discussions aimed at ending nearly six decades of insurgency in the state of two million. The group denied any hand in the blasts. Most of the rebel groups say they are seeking to protect their ethnic identities and allege the federal government has exploited the resources in the mineral and oil-rich region. Both the NDFB and the outlawed United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) have claimed responsibility for some of the attacks in Assam.

“The explosions are an answer to chief minister Tarun Gogoi’s offer for a ceasefire,” ULFA commander-in-chief Paresh Baruah was quoted as saying by local newspapers Monday. Gogoi on Sunday called on the Indian government to pressure neighbouring Bangladesh and Myanmar to demolish the camps of militant groups on their soil. Dhaka denies the presence of any Indian rebels although New Delhi says many rebel groups in the northeast have camps in Bangladesh with which India shares a 4,095-kilometre (2,539-mile) -long border.

Myanmar has repeatedly assured New Delhi it would take all measures to oust Indian rebels if they were in that country. More than 50,000 people have lost their lives to insurgency in the northeast since India’s independence in 1947.