Six dead in suspected rebel attack

Suspected rebels woke up sleeping villagers in north-eastern India and opened fire with automatic weapons, killing six of them and raising the death toll to 63 from three days of violence in a region where dozens of ethnic rebel groups are fighting for separate homelands.

Seven people also were wounded when the group of heavily armed militants descended on Gelapukhuri, a village 130 miles north of Gauhati, the capital of Assam state, said police officer P. Baruah, who was reached from the region by telephone.

The rebels shot four of the villagers to death instantly, Baruah said. Nine wounded were rushed to a local hospital, where two succumbed to their injuries, he said.

Baruah blamed the National Democratic Front of Boroland, or NDFB, for the attack, the latest in a spasm of violence that claimed 57 lives over the weekend, when suspected rebels bombed utilities, a tea plantation and a crowded marketplace.

At least 18 bombings and shootings have been carried out in Nagaland and Assam states since Saturday. The attacks – particularly an explosion Saturday that ripped through a railway station full of commuters – angered even some separatist leaders.

A leader of one separatist group, the United Liberation Front of Asom, or ULFA, has been quoted as taking responsibility for some of the attacks.

No arrests have been made so far, police said.

Assam’s top police official has blamed all of the attacks on two militant groups – the NDFB and the ULFA.

“The entire string of attacks was a joint operation by the ULFA and the NDFB,” Inspector-General Khagen Sarma said.

Yesterday, the elusive commander in chief of the outlawed ULFA, Paresh Barua, claimed responsibility for four of the attacks in Assam state, where the group has been fighting for a separate homeland since 1979 in an insurgency that has left more than 10,000 dead in the past decade.

“This is our answer to Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi’s cease-fire call,” the English-language newspaper The Sentinel quoted Barua as saying.

Government officials last week offered a cease-fire to both of the militant groups, and asked for a response before October 15.

Yesterday was the 18th anniversary of the founding of the NDFB, which is demanding a homeland for Boroland, a region that straddles both Nagaland and Assam states.

Nearly 40 separatist groups have been fighting in the mountainous region of multiple ethnicities wedged between Bangladesh, Bhutan and Myanmar.

Rebels in Nagaland have been leading one of Asia’s longest-running separatist conflicts, dating to shortly before India gained independence from Britain in 1947. Some 15,000 people have been killed in the fighting.

But one Naga separatist group engaged in talks with the government denounced the attacks, and said it was launching its own investigation into the violence.

Kraibo Chawang, of the separatist National Socialist Council of Nagaland, said that the assaults were ”aimed at derailing and sabotaging our peace talks with the Indian government.”

Nagaland’s death toll stood at 28, while Assam’s rose Monday to 35.