Police claim four Bastar villagers injured after Maoists used them as human shields

New details about last week’s encounter in Chhattisgarh’s Abujhmad have emerged with the police claiming on Tuesday that the Naxals had used villagers, including minors, in an unsuccessful bid to save the life of their senior cadre, Karthik.

Karthik was among seven Naxals killed in the encounter on December 12 and at least four civilians sustained bullet injuries, the police said.

On December 12, in an encounter between Maoists and security forces in the forest hills of Kalhaja-Dondarbera of south Abujhmad area, the bodies of seven armed uniformed Maoists comprising five men and two women were recovered along with weapons, These included Karthik alias Dasru, who was their Odisha State Committee member and was carrying a reward of ₹25 lakh, said a senior police officer.

“According to preliminary information, the villagers were kept together to carry the goods of the Naxalites and during the encounter, under the cover of these villagers, the security forces were fired upon in which it was reported that four villagers were injured,” a police statement issued on Tuesday evening read, adding that more information was being collected regarding the incident.

The operation was carried out by personnel from the District Reserve Guard (DRG) from Kondagaon, Bastar, Narayanpur and Dantewada, along with the State’s Special Task Force (STF) and Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF). They proceeded after receiving information about the presence of Maoists in Abujhmad, a dense and large forested area covering the districts of Bijapur, Dantewada and Narayanpur.

A senior police officer said that they had received information about many more Maoists getting injured in the encounter and they were being treated by the Maoists in the surrounding forest area and were in the process of verifying the same.

Over the past one year, there has been an uptick in the operations carried out by security forces in the conflict-affected Bastar region. In his recent visit to the State that concluded on Monday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said Naxalism, a major internal security challenge concentrated mostly in Chhattisgarh, would be eliminated by March 2026.