Imphal/New Delhi:

A soldier of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) was killed in action after a joint patrol with the state police was ambushed by suspected insurgents in Manipur’s Jiribam district. Two police commandos were injured.

The police said the joint patrol came under heavy fire from the suspected insurgents in the district bordering Assam. The CRPF soldier was walking near a patrol SUV when the suspected insurgents opened fire.

Visuals of the ambush site shows the SUV with several bullet holes and a shattered rear windshield. Two police commandos who were inside the vehicle were hit.

“We returned effective fire. The insurgents took cover of the forest and ran away. A combing operation is going on,” a senior police officer told NDTV on phone from Jiribam, 220 km from the state capital Imphal.

Manipur Chief Minister N Biren Singh in a post on X condemned the attack by who he called “suspected Kuki militants”.

Before today’s ambush, tension in Jiribam had been high in recent weeks following clashes between the Meitei community and the Hmar tribes.

The district didn’t see violence for over a year since Meitei-Kuki ethnic clashes began in May 2023; however, clashes erupted in Jiribam last month, forcing over a thousand people from both the communities to live in relief camps, some in neighbouring Assam.

Manipur’s second lifeline National Highway 37 which connects Imphal with Assam’s Cachar passes through Jiribam. The other lifeline that connects Manipur with the rest of the country is National Highway 2, which remains blocked in Kuki-dominated Kangpokpi district. This highway goes to Assam via Nagaland. The Kuki tribes also allege the Meitei community has blocked all essential items and cargo trucks from going to the hill areas where they live.

The ethnic violence between the valley-dominant Meitei community and nearly two dozen tribes known as Kukis – a term given by the British in colonial times – who are dominant in some hill areas of Manipur, has killed over 220 people and internally displaced nearly 50,000.

Armed people on both sides call themselves “village defence volunteers”, a definition of the belligerents that has become the most controversial since nothing stops these “volunteers” from killing people under the insurance provided by “in self-defence”.

The general category Meiteis want to be included under the Scheduled Tribes category, while the nearly two dozen tribes that share ethnic ties with people in neighbouring Myanmar’s Chin State and Mizoram want a separate administrative carved out of Manipur, citing discrimination and unequal share of resources and power with the Meiteis.

Imphal:

A team of Manipur Police commandos sent to a border town as reinforcement after a senior police officer was shot dead this morning were ambushed by suspected insurgents on their way, the police said.

Many commandos were injured in the ambush that happened 10 km short of Tengnoupal district.

Troops of the Assam Rifles rushed to the ambush site and rescued the police commandos, government sources said. Many have been taken to hospital.

The India-Myanmar border trading town of Moreh in Tengnoupal, where senior police officer Chingtham Anand was shot dead by a suspected insurgent sniper while he was overseeing the construction of a helipad, is about 115 km from the state capital Imphal.

While the distance is not much on paper for a highway on the plains, the Imphal-Moreh route has many hills, jungles and hairpin bends that significantly raise the risk of ambush by insurgents, sources said.

The Manipur Police sent the commando reinforcements to Moreh after security forces started an operation to neutralise the suspected insurgent sniper who killed the police officer, sources said.

The unprecedented attack on the helipad project this morning and the subsequent ambush marked a sharp increase in hostilities between the security forces and insurgents amid the semblance of hard-won normalcy in ethnic violence-hit Manipur.

A small squad of Manipur Police commandos who have been stationed in Moreh since the May 3 violence is being bolstered with reinforcements now. Sending the Border Security Force (BSF) and police personnel to the border town, however, has not been easy due to roadblocks by miscreants, sources said, adding the need for a larger helipad was felt and so a decision to build it was taken.

The new helipad is being built jointly by the state and the BSF. This will be the third helipad in Moreh. The two other helipads are under the Assam Rifles, whose operational control is with the army.

The state forces and the BSF are making the new helipad for their own exclusive use to transport police and paramilitary jawans to Moreh from other parts of Manipur, since the road to Moreh is blocked by miscreants at many places and there is a high risk of ambush, as had happened today, sources said. The insurgents want to stop the new helipad from being made operational, they said.