Police said they killed a top Maoist rebel leader in a shootout Friday, but the insurgents accused authorities of killing him in custody, according to AP. The rebels have been fighting in several Indian states for decades, demanding land and jobs for agricultural laborers and the poor. Their attacks have grown bolder recently as the government renewed an offensive against them. On Monday, nearly 200 Maoist rebels ambushed paramilitary soldiers in Chhattisgarh state in a dense forest and shot and killed 27 of them. As part of their campaign to drive back the rebels, police said they battled Friday with the Maoists in the Jogapur forest area in the neighboring southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Cherukuri Rajkumar, also known as Azad, was killed, said top police official P. Pramod Kumar. But in a telephone call to journalists on Friday, Gudsa Usendi, a spokesman for the Maoists, accused police of killing Azad in custody after capturing him a day earlier in the forest, nearly 200 miles (300 kilometers) north of Hyderabad. The rebels, who call themselves the Communist Party of India (Maoist), say they are inspired by the late Chinese communist revolutionary leader Mao Zedong. They have tapped into the rural poor's growing anger at being left out of the country's economic gains and are now present in 20 of India's 28 states. They have an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 fighters. India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has called the rebels the country's greatest «internal security threat.» In May, officials blamed the group for causing a train derailment that killed nearly 150 people in West Bengal state. In April they killed 76 troops in an attack in Chhattisgarh state. They frequently target police and government officials, whom they accuse of colluding with landlords and rich farmers to exploit the poor. About 2,000 people _ including police, militants and civilians _ have been killed over the past few years.
