A 36-year-old District Reserve Guard (DRG) jawan was killed in an encounter with Maoists in Abujhmad Wednesday afternoon. According to the Inspector General of Police for Bastar Range Sundarraj P, security forces comprising of the DRG and the Border Security Force (BSF) were part of a joint search operation when an encounter broke out around 1 pm Wednesday in the forest of Sonpur and Kokhametta, some 30 km from Narayanpur headquarters. The firing went on in intervals. According to the officer, head constable Birendra Kumar Sori suffered an injury and died on the spot. A resident of Narharpur village in Kanker district – one of the seven Maoist-affected districts in Bastar region - Sori had joined Narayanpur Police in 2010 and had been given an out-of-turn promotion as a head constable in 2018 for his services. Security forces have stepped up their anti-Maoist operations in Abujhmad, also known as Maad – swathes of largely unsurveyed land larger than the state of Goa and located majorly in Narayanpur district. The campaign has killed over 100 Maoists in the area.
