A day after Doordarshan video journalist Achyutanand Sahu and two police officials were killed in a Maoist attack in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district on Tuesday, videos recorded by Sahu’s colleague during the incident have surfaced.
Mormukut Sharma, a lighting assistant who was part of a three-member team from the state broadcaster that went to Chhattisgarh to cover the assembly elections scheduled to take place in November, recorded the videos as the sound of gunfire rang in the background. “I might be killed in this attack....even in the face of death, I am not feeling afraid,” he says in the video above.
In a second video, shared on Twitter by journalist Aditya Raj Kaul, Sharma, who survived the attack, can be heard asking a police official for water.
Journalist Dhiraj Kumar, the third member of the team from Doordarshan that was attacked, told PTI that he fell into a ditch when their motorcycle lost balance and Sharma also crawled towards him. “For the next 45 minutes, I just heard sounds of bullets and grenades. There were about 200 Maoists. Some grenades fell near us, but thank God they did not explode,” Kumar said.
A third police official who was injured during the attack died early on Wednesday, increasing the toll to four.
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