Maoists ranked right after IS and Boko Haram, India 4th most terror affected

New Delhi: The Communist Party of India (Maoist), the banned outfit, is the fourth most deadly terror outfit after Taliban, the Islamic State and Boko Haram, data collected by a research centre in the United States has found.

According to reports, a total of 11,774 terror attacks took place across the world in 2015 and India was the fourth worst-affected country. However, attacks in India were relatively less lethal.

The report by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism said that as many as 791 attacks took place in India last year and Maoists were behind 43 percent of them.

At least 176 people were killed in about 343 attacks carried out by the CPI (Maoists) across the country, over half of them in Chhattisgarh (21 percent), Manipur (12 percent), Jammu and Kashmir (11 percent) and Jharkhand+ (10 percent).

The number of attacks in Chhattisgarh rose to 167 in 2015 from 76 in 2014, the data found.

The report also said that at least 862 people were kidnapped/taken hostage by terrorists and insurgent groups in India, a figure that rose three times from 305 in 2014. Of the 862 people, Maoists alone kidnapped/took hostage 707 people last year.

The data provided by the Home Ministry also showed that civilians and 802 security personnel were killed by Naxals between 2010 and 2015.

While CPI(Maoist) carried out 343 terror attacks last year, Taliban was responsible for 1,093 strikes that killed 4,512 people, the Islamic State group or ISIS was behind 931 attacks killing 6,050 people and Boko Haram was involved in 491 attacks that took 5,450 lives.

Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) stood fifth in the National Consortium’s data, which showed the outfit active in Turkey carried out 238 strikes in which 287 people were killed.