Country bomb attacks, arson and murder continued on Thursday in Kannur district, Kerala’s political killing field, in the wake of the tit-for-tat killings involving the RSS and the CPI(M). The carnage began on Wednesday, leaving three lying dead on the streets and nine seriously injured.A RSS man, Mahesh was done to death in Kannur on Thursday evening and one more, Anilkumar, was badly chopped up and has been hospitalised in a critical state. CPI(M) and RSS mobs threw country bombs at each other at some parts of the trouble-torn district. The police fired at angry mobs belonging the two sides defying the prohitory orders, clamped since Wednesday evening, about to clash at a street junction in Thalassery.The district had remained under the hartal that both sides had called to protest the killings of their respective supporters.On Wednesday, houses and shops were ransacked and damaged, supporters of either side selectively picked and attacked on the roads —even domestic animals and pets were dragged out and slaughtered — in a two-hour orgy of violence that began minutes after a local RSS leader was stabbed by a bunch of CPI(M) men.Thursday’s killing took the number of deaths in political violence in Kannur in the last four months to nine, of which six have been CPI(M) men. About 300 have been killed and scores crippled or maimed for life in political assaults, over the last couple of decades in Kannur. Even the latest figures from the National Crime Records Bureau say Kannur is ahead of any other district in the country in terms of riot cases, logging no less than 737 of these in 2006.Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan has appealed for calm and restraint on both sides after local leaders of neither the RSS nor the CPI(M) turned up for a Government-brokered peace meet in the district on Wednesday. The Home Department has, meanwhile, rushed in cops from all neighbouring districts.
