Some personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) had to spend the night in the jungles of Bihar’s Aurangabad district with the bodies of 10 of their colleagues killed in a Maoist attack on Monday.
The commandos belonging to the CRPF’s elite CoBRA battalion were killed when a team of CRPF and Bihar Police were approaching a camp of the rebels.
CRPF DG K. Durga Prasad said the 500 metre-long approach to the camp was rigged with at least 300 IEDs and the 10 CoBRA commandos took all the impact of the blasts.
A senior CRPF official said that though the operation started at 4 p.m. when over 100 CRPF personnel marched towards the Aurangabad forests acting on a specific tip-off about the presence of Maoists, they were unaware about the large number of casualties till 8 p.m.
On Tuesday, an angry CRPF jawan lashed out at his seniors for not sending the chopper in time for evacuation of the injured.
“Some of these boys saw their colleagues dying. A chopper did make a landing at night but due to lack of visibility all the injured could not be evacuated. The pilots took three of the injured to Patna,” said Mr. Prasad.
Another official said that initially the information was that only four CRPF personnel were injured.
“We thought we would send reinforcements and the four injured people could be taken out without suspending the operations,” said the CRPF official.
“Information that we lost these boys, came in bits and pieces…it was 7.30 p.m. when we learnt of the actual number of casualties…some men in the forests told us they would remain with the martyrs…we asked them to stay put as it was night and if they started firing at each other by mistake there could have been bigger casualties,” he said.
