“India’s top domestic security official strongly condemned on Tuesday a brazen attack by Maoist rebels in which gunmen on motorcycles and pickup trucks killed 24 police officers during a daylight ambush against a paramilitary camp in the state of West Bengal.
The attack occurred on Monday afternoon and represented a serious setback in India’s mounting campaign against the Communist Party of India (Maoist), which has a presence in 20 of the country’s 28 states and exerts outright control over several isolated regions.
‘Their goal is to seize power,’ the home affairs minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, said in a statement condemning the attack. ‘Their weapon is violence. No organization or group in a democratic republic has the right to take to violence to overpower the established legal authority.’ “
(Source: India Condemns Attack by Maoists That Killed 24 Police Officers – NYTimes.com)
