RAIPUR: Police killed eight suspected rebels, including five women, in a gunbattle in central India on Tuesday, local officers said, the latest deadly encounter in the country’s long-running Maoist insurgency.

Police ambushed a large group of heavily armed Maoists in a rebel stronghold near the border of Chhattisgarh and Telangana states, triggering a battle which began inearly morning and lasted six hours, they said.

“Forces today killed at least eight Maoists in Sakler forest,” Santosh Singh, a senior police officer, said in Sukma district, some 390 kilometres from the Chhattisgarh state capital Raipur.

“Among those killed are five female and three male Maoists,” Singh said, add that six assault rifles were found with the rebels.

Sukma police chief D. Shravan Kumar said elite anti-Maoist police squads launched the ambush in a joint state operation after receiving a tipoff about rebel movements through the forest.

India’s Maoist insurgency began in the 1960s, inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, and has cost thousands of lives.

Published in Dawn, March 2nd, 2016