NEW DELHI, Jan. 30 (UPI) -- Police in India's northeastern state of Manipur are blaming Naga rebels for violence during voting in which seven people were killed including a young girl.
Director General of Police for Manipur Ratnakar Baral said a suspected rebel entered a local polling station in Chandel constituency and asked officials to stop the voting, a report by The Times of India said.
When officials refused to stop the polling process, the rebel fired a pistol at them.
Several Central Reserve Police Force officers rushed in and returned fire, killing the rebel.
"Six persons were killed on the spot," said Baral. "An injured person later died in hospital."
The dead were one police officer, four polling officials, a civilian and a 14-year-old girl who had accompanied her parents to the polling station, he said.
Police also said they believe two other rebels were in the polling station at the time of the shooting but escaped in the confusion, The Times of Indian report said.
An identity card on the dead suspected rebel indicted he was a local teacher, police said. He is believed to be a member of the National Socialist Council of Nagaland, one of several separatist groups in northeastern India.
In an attack at another polling station last week, two CRPF officers were killed, the Times said.
Police also recovered a home-made bomb near the house of a worker for the Congress political party in an area of Imphal, the state capital.
Turnout for polling in Manipur could reach as high as 86 percent. A total of 279 candidates, including 15 women, were running in the election for the 60-seat Manipur Legislative Assembly, a report in Manipur's The Sangai Express newspaper said.
The isolated and economically poor state is around 8,600 square miles and has a population of less than 3 million. Around half the population lives in villages outside main cities and towns.
Manipur also is in the heartland of an area comprising similarly small and isolated states which have been under attack by local rebels seeking more autonomy and a greater share of the wealth from natural resource exploitation.
Manipur is bounded by Mizoram state to the south, Assam to the west and Myanmar, formerly called Burma, to the east. To the north lies Nagaland.
During the last Manipur state election in 2007, 16 police officers were killed in a rebel attack. To ensure security, the state has drafted in from other states 30,000 police and paramilitary personnel.
Manipur is the first of five states to have elections in the next several weeks. Results for the elections in Manipur, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab and Goa will be released in early March.
Elections in India's northeastern and eastern states are often marred by violence.
Maoist guerrillas, also known as Naxalites after the village of Naxalbari in West Bengal where the group started in the late 1960s, are active in what government officials call the Red Corridor -- the mineral-rich but remote and poor eastern states of West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Orissa, Chhattisgarh and northern parts or Andhra Pradesh.
