India court sentences 10 Maoist rebels to death over 2013 attack

A special Indian court has sentenced 10 Maoist rebels to death over their role in a 2013 ambush on a convoy that killed 27 people, including members of the Congress party.

The Maoists were convicted of multiple offences, including conspiracy and waging war against the state, before being handed the death penalty, India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA) said Wednesday.

The nearly six-decade-long Maoist rebellion, which began in the 1960s and killed more than 12,000 people, was once described by a former prime minister as the biggest internal security threat India faced.

However, the insurgency has been effectively defeated after a sustained military offensive across the “Red Corridor”, areas where the guerrillas shut out the government and established their own parallel administration.

The land-mine and gun attack in May 2013 took place in a remote forested area of the central state of Chhattisgarh, effectively wiping out the top state leadership of the Congress party.

The attackers detonated an explosive device, opened “indiscriminate firing” and threw grenades at the convoy, the NIA said in a statement.

The agency said its investigation had established that the 10 Maoist cadres were involved in a “criminal conspiracy to attack and kill senior Congress leaders and security personnel”.

India imposes the death penalty by hanging, although it is rarely carried out in practice.

The last executions in India were in March 2020, when four men convicted of the 2012 gang rape and murder of a woman on a Delhi bus were hanged, in a case that sparked huge nationwide protests.