The National Investigation Agency (NIA) on Friday arrested two persons for their purported involvement in a CPI (Maoist) attack on the security forces, in which one civilian and six alleged Maoists were killed near Tiriya village in Chhattisgarh in July 2019.
The accused have been identified as Kandula Sirisha and Duddu Prabhakar. The agency has arrested six persons in the case so far.
According to the NIA, both the accused were working closely with top leaders of the banned outfit and its different frontal organisations to spread its ideology. Sirisha was previously active as an armed cadre (tech. in-charge) of CPI (Maoist). Both the accused also received funds from the outfit. They were frequent visitors to the core “Naxal belt” in the Andhra-Odisha border special zone, where they would meet the late Akkiraju Haragopal, a central committee member of CPI (Maoist) and leader of the United Front.
The Tiriya encounter had taken place in July 2019, when a joint team of local District Reserve Guard, Special Task Force and Central Reserve Police Force entered a forest area conducting searches, following a tip-off that a group of outfit’s members had gathered there to plan a major attack on July 28, observed by them as “Shaheed Diwas”.
After the encounter, the security forces had seized arms and ammunition, along with incriminating handwritten documents, from the spot. The case was initially registered by the area police and then taken over by the NIA on March 18, 2021.
