Patna: Armed Maoists raided a railway station in Jharkhand state late Thursday night and set it on fire to protest certain policies of the state government. The rebels also damaged the communication set-up of the station and set the engine of a goods train on fire, creating panic among the railway officials.
Police said a group of some 100 rebels raided Dumari railway station which falls under Jharkhand’s Bokaro district and then set it on fire after asking all railway staff to leave the station. They also took away the walkie talkie sets of train drivers before vanishing into the nearly jungles, reports said.
The torching led to disruption of rail communication for hours in the Dhanbad division of the East Central railway as several trains remained stranded at various stations.
Authorities said the rebels had chalked out a major plan to cause heavy casualties, but the police defused their plan. According to them, the rebels had planted 40 can bombs in a series to trigger powerful blasts, but the police detected them on time and defused all of them before they could cause loss of human lives.
“We defused the plan by the Maoists to trigger blasts and cause loss of lives by acting promptly on time. Now we have launched a massive combing operation to nab the absconding rebels,” a local police official YS Ramesh told the local media today.
Before leaving the place, the Maoists left behind hand bills in the station premises that said they were opposing the state Government’s amendments to the new Tenancy Act.
The incident comes barely a day after a local court in Bihar awarded death sentence to five Maoists after finding them guilty of killing security personnel during the last Lok Sabha elections. All convicts were part of the Maoist group which had attacked a patrolling party of security personnel during the last Lok Sabha polls in Munger district, killing two policemen and wounding 10 others.
Indian government has described Maoists as a biggest threat to nation’s internal security even as rebels claim to be fighting for the rights of rural villagers. As per an official report, Maoists are currently active in more than one-third of India’s 600-plus administrative districts.
