Indian police recovered 12 bodies from rice fields and roadsides in the remote state of Assam on Wednesday as the death toll from ethnic violence rose to 38 after four days of bloody clashes.
At least 170,000 villagers have fled from their homes to relief camps, government buildings and schools to escape the unrest, which has raged since Friday with scores of homes burnt down by rioters.
Military reinforcements were called in to try to quell the fighting between indigenous Bodo tribes and Muslim settlers who have competed for years in long-standing territorial disputes.
“It appears all these 12 people were killed in overnight attacks,” said Tarun Gogoi, the chief minister of Assam, an oil and tea-rich state in the northeast of India bordering on Bhutan and Bangladesh.
“The situation is tense,” Gogoi told AFP, adding that there had been a “massive deployment of army, police, and paramilitary troopers”.
Northeast India, which is linked to the rest of the country by a narrow land bridge, has seen decades of friction among ethnic and separatist groups, though some rebel movements have recently started peace talks with the government.
News channels broadcast pictures of homes that had been set ablaze by rioters, and of women and children gathered in the government-run camps where food was handed out and soldiers were on duty to provide protection.
Hagrama Mohilary, chief of the Bodoland Territorial Council, a local government body, told AFP by telephone that an estimated 170,000 people are sheltering in relief camps.
Northeast India clashes kill 38, displace 170,000
