GAUHATI, India — Rebels in India's remote northeast have fatally shot five bus passengers to press their demand for a separate state, police said Saturday. Rebels pulled the men from the bus, lined them up along a highway in India's Assam state and killed them late Friday, said the state's additional director general of police A. P. Raut. Raut said the victims were targeted because they were from outside of Assam. The rebels want to pressure the government into conceding to their demand for a separate state for the ethnic Bodo community. They belong to a breakaway faction of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland, which has been fighting since 1986 for the creation of the state within India. “We have identified the men who carried out the attack,” Raut said. Three other men were wounded in the attack, which occurred near the small town of Ramphalbil in Kokrajhar district, about 250 kilometers (150 miles) west of Gauhati, Assam's capital. The Indian government is engaged in talks with two factions of the rebel movement, but the latest attack was carried out by a third splinter group that is not part of the talks and is resorting to violence to bring pressure on the government, Raut said. — AP
