Hyderabad, March 1: Maoist violence touched a new high in Andhra Pradesh today when eight villagers were summoned and shot down and two maimed in retaliation to a 1998 killing of rebels.

The retribution was played out in the forest of Vempenta village, about 280 km from Hyderabad, in Kurnool district.

?They (about 20 Naxalites) summoned over 50 villagers to the forest. After speaking to each of them separately, they grouped eight persons and shot them dead. They punished two others by amputating them with axes,? said Atul Singh, the district superintendent of police.

The action, he added, was retaliatory in nature.

The Maoists suspected the villagers of burning alive nine rebels in their forest hideout in 1998 in retaliation to the killing of the sarpanch.

The maimed villagers, whose hands and legs were said to have been chopped off, were brutalised for apparently siding with police and harassing local Dalit sympathisers of the rebels.

The Maoists? last mass retaliatory killing was in 1987 when they torched a bogie of the Kakatiya Express in Warangal district to avenge an encounter killing of their comrades.

Twelve people, including a child, had died.

Those killed today were Murali, Ravindra Reddy, Swamidoss, Janardhan, Rajendra Prasad, Shivaiah, Davidu and Swamulu, each of whose families will get an ex gratia of Rs 5 lakh.

The maimed, N. Shiva Reddy and Shankar Reddy, have been rushed here for treatment after first aid in the district hospital. The government has promised them free medical care.

The Maoists left the scene after raising slogans against the Congress government of Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy and warned villagers of more retaliatory measures if they invited police forces.

Forces have been rushed to the spot.

P. Varavara Rao, spokesperson for the CPI (Maoists), however, said ?this should not have happened?. ?The killing of villagers by Maoists has now complicated the peace process.?

Nearly 21 rebels and as many civilians have been killed since last month when peace talks with the government, which began in October, broke down after several Maoists died in two separate encounters.

Andhra home minister K. Jana Reddy held an emergency meeting with director-general of police Swaranjit Sen ? both of whom have rushed to Vempenta in a helicopter ? and the chief minister even as Maoists struck across the state today.

The rebels blew up a forest department office in the Tadvai forests of Warangal with claymore mines, injuring a CRPF jawan, police said.