Charge sheet filed in NIA court against 17 Naxalites who attacked CRPF camp

Jagdalpur. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Friday filed a chargesheet before the NIA Special Court in Jagdalpur against 17 Maoists in connection with the attack on the CRPF camp. One of these Maoists has been arrested, who has been identified as Sodi Baman alias Deval. Apart from the arrested Maoist Sodi Baman alias Deval, the remaining 16 absconding Maoists in the NIA chargesheet include 2 Central Committee Members (CCM), 2 Special Regional/State Committee Members (SZC/SCM) and other top cadres of PLGA BN No. 01, Telangana State Committee and Pamed Area Committee.

Charges have been filed against these Maoists under various sections of the IPC, Arms Act, Explosive Substances Act and UA(P) Act. The case relates to the attack on the CRPF new camp at Dharmavaram in Bijapur district and two adjacent CRPF/Cobra camps at Chintavagu and Pamed on January 16, 2024. The attackers had attempted to loot weapons and other items of the security forces from the camps. Earlier, on 17 December 2023, 12 CRPF personnel were injured in an attack on the Dharmavaram CRPF camp set up. The NIA took over the case from the local police on 9 February 2024, and registered a case against 21 named and 250-300 unidentified armed cadres of the banned terrorist organization CPI (Maoist). Investigation revealed that the accused named in the chargesheet were involved in recruiting youth as part of a criminal conspiracy to wage war against the Government of India. They possessed banned weapons, ammunition and explosive materials, and organized and attended conspiracy meetings.

The Maoists had also set up training dummy camps as a replica of the target camp, trained their armed cadres to carry out armed rebellion and gave motivational speeches, besides conducting recce of the said camps and carrying out final attacks. Further investigation is underway in the case.