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A Special Police Officer was injured during a gun battle with Maoists near Narayanpur city of Chhattisgarh on Friday. The gun battle took place in the police line, half a kilometre from Narayanpur. Thamak Lal Patel, Special Police Officer (SPO) of Narayanpur who was injured in the encounter said: " There were three men, we thought they were villagers. When we called them, they were quiet. After that they started firing, we returned the fire but they were the first to fire," Patel said. The SPO is undergoing treatment at the Civil Hospital in Narayanpur. Maoist rebels in April massacred 76 security personnel in an ambush in the jungles of Dantewada district of Chhattisgarh State. This attack wa one of the bloodiest attacks by the rebels on security forces. The Maoists have spread into rural pockets in 20 of India's 28 states and their crusade has upset business prospects worth billions of dollars in mining and allied industries. Thousands have been killed in the Maoist insurgency, which began in the late 1960s, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has warned the rebels have managed to retain support among a cross-section of society, and remain the country's biggest internal security threat.

Maoists engage in gun battle with police in Narayanpur