| Hutty |
Posted
on 13-Apr-02 09:43 AM
SATBARIYA, Nepal (AP) -- Marking the worst battle in a six-year-old guerrilla war, Nepalese authorities on Saturday raised the death toll from a night of fighting to 160 -- many of them police beheaded by Maoist rebels.
The dramatic jump in the death -- the government had reported 54 deaths Friday -- was revealed by local officials to journalists who traveled overnight by road to the two remote towns in western Nepal that saw most of the fighting on Thursday night and early Friday.
Police Inspector Padam Vohra told The Associated Press that 60 policemen were killed while defending the house of Interior Security Minister Khum Bahadur Khadka from a rebel attack. Another 27 policemen who surrendered were beheaded, and two were burned alive, he said. About 30 police survived.
Vohra said 11 policemen were killed in an attack on a police station in the nearby town of Lamahi. The two attacks set off overnight gunbattles that left hundreds of rebels dead, he said.
An AP reporter saw at least 60 bodies of guerrillas half buried along a dry riverbed a few miles from the minister's house. The bodies had apparently been left by the retreating guerrillas.
Some of the bodies were headless and others were being eaten by dogs. Many corpses were half-buried with only their legs sticking above the shallow graves.
Surrounded by thousands
Thwran Thaket, a senior police constable, said he believed the rebels took many more fallen comrades in two trucks along with 95 rifles and three machine guns looted from the dead policemen.
The minister's house was gutted and blackened by fire. Two burned sedans were parked outside the 10-foot-high boundary wall.
On the ground were blotches of blood, shreds of police uniforms, destroyed sofas and cupboards, and twisted, blackened bicycles. Shards of broken glass were scattered across the town.
The 120 paramilitary police guarding the house were surrounded by thousands of rebels, witnesses said.
"They are so ferocious that they killed officers ... even after they surrendered," Vohra said. "They were stripped naked, then paraded, and finally beheaded with khukris, he said, referring to the traditional Nepali knives.
The towns where the attacks occurred are in Dang district, about 190 miles west of the capital, Katmandu.
'Nobody to fight them'
It was the worst single night of violence since the Maoist insurgency erupted in 1996 in the poor Himalayan country, which is ruled by an elected government under a constitutional monarchy.
In the worst previous fighting, guerrillas killed 137 soldiers, police and civilians on February 17 in attacks in Mangalsen town in the northwestern Achham district.
"The situation is so bad that I don't know how long I will live," said the Dang district's chief administrator, M.P. Yadav.
"There is nobody to fight them. There is no equipment to fight them. We are helpless, hapless," he told the Associated Press.
Nepal has been under a state of emergency since Nov. 26, when the rebels withdrew from peace talks. The army has been mobilized to help the poorly equipped police fight the guerrillas, but rebel attacks have continued unabated.
Also Saturday, a bomb exploded near a school in the northwestern town of Laltin Bazaar, killing three people and injuring four others, police said.
One postal worker, one town resident and a man who had just dropped off his wife at the school were killed.
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