10 killed in ‘gunfight’ were village volunteers, says Kuki-Zo council

The men killed in the November 11 gunfight with security forces in Jiribam district were village defence volunteers and not militants, the Kuki-Zo Council said.

The 10 men killed in the November 11 gunfight with security forces in Jiribam district were village defence volunteers and not militants, the Kuki-Zo Council, an umbrella group of Kuki-Zo-Hmar groups based in Churachandpur district of Manipur, has said.

Protests erupted in Manipur after accomplices of the gunmen, who survived the gunfight, shot dead two Meitei men and abducted six civilian women and children. The six were later found dead. (AFP)

The five villages in Churachandpur, where the 10 men were from, are not breeding grounds for militancy, the council said in a statement on Sunday.

“The 10 Kuki-Zo village volunteers who lost their lives in Jiribam were acting in defence of their community and loved ones, not as aggressors. Their intention was to protect the outnumbered Kuki-Zo villages from the onslaught of Meitei militants, not to engage in militant activities themselves,” the council said.

The village volunteers acted in retaliation to the suspected Meitei militants raping and killing a Hmar tribal woman in Jiribam district on November 7, the group said.

“This incident sparked off a reaction from the Kuki-Zo village volunteers on 11 November in which the Kuki-Zo village volunteers set ablaze several shops and residences in Jakuradhor and Borobekra. In a deadly plot by the Meitei police Commandos and particularly the CRPF posted in Jiribam the 10 Kuki-Zo volunteers were killed. 6 Meitei women including children have also lost their lives,” the council said.

Manipur government and police have in their statements said that 10 Kuki militants were killed in a gunfight with CRPF personnel on November 11, when the security forces were attacked. The forces also said that the gunmen fired at CRPF camps to prevent the forces from stopping the militants who were firing at the displaced Meitei people in Jiribam. The accomplices of the gunmen, who survived the gunfight, shot dead two Meitei men and abducted six civilian women and children. The six were later found dead.

Manipur chief minister Biren Singh in an interview to HT on Thursday said that the village defence volunteers don’t carry RPG launchers, the men weren’t defending their village, and that they had travelled over 250-kms from Churachandpur to Jiribam to kill internally displaced people but were stopped by CRPF.

The council in a statement said that while the postmortem reports of six Meiteis were completed and handed over to their families, there has been a glaring lack of transparency in the case of the 10 Kuki-Zo village volunteers. While the family of the six deceased denied having received copies of the post mortem examination reports from police or hospital authorities, the reports of three deceased were widely circulated on social media groups.

“The absence of a preliminary report on their deaths has raised serious concerns and accusations of bias within the community… if no postmortem reports on the deaths of the 10 Kuki-Zo Village Volunteers are received within a specified time frame, we will be left with no choice but to resort to serious agitation to demand answers and justice. The delay in providing postmortem reports has only added to the frustration and anger among the Kuki-Zo community,” the statement said.