(Left) Mangled remains of the red Bolero; a crater on the road where the attack took place. (PTI)

Darbha (Chhattisgarh), May 26: Omprakash Singh shudders when he remembers the moment late in the afternoon yesterday.

The Congress worker from Jagdalpur was returning home from the Parivartan Rally in Sukma, riding his motorbike a little ahead of the party motorcade with a friend on the pillion.

“A 10-year-old boy told me near Tongpal (about 15km from the ambush site) that there would be problems ahead but I didn’t take him seriously,” Singh said.

In hindsight, he believes “the Maoist informers had penetrated the convoy in Sukma”.

Singh missed being caught in the ambush by seconds: he heard the blast that started it and went to the Darbha police station.

He was still trembling this evening at the thought of so many top-rung party leaders having been killed. One of his closest friends, Gopichand Madhvani, was among the dead.

Paramilitary troops stood guard around the stretch of road where the ambush happened, carefully studying the scene.

“They gave the convoy no chance,” one of them said. By all accounts, the forces could reach the spot only by 8.30pm yesterday — two to three hours after the ambush ended.

“The Maoists had cut off this stretch by blocking the roads with trees,” the jawan said.

“The firing began around 4.30pm,” said a 20-year-old tribal who lives with his parents in a temple 1km from the massacre spot.

“I rushed home when I heard the firing; I had gone to the forest to collect firewood,” he said.

At the carnage site, the stench of blood was overpowering. A morning drizzle had turned the weather muggy and hot.

The smashed windshields and windows of the pockmarked vehicles with their flat tyres indicated the bullets had flown thick and fast, some at close range.

That must have been when the rebels began searching for Mahendra Karma and killed a few passengers. A few bodies were found on the other side of the road, implying some were shot when they tried to run.

“Karma pleaded with them not to harm his workers and other leaders and to take his life instead,” injured MLA Kawasi Lakhma said from his hospital bed.

A hundred metres deeper inside the forest, on a steep and rocky hillock amid bamboo trees, was a spot bearing thick bloodstains. It’s here that state Congress chief Nand Kumar Patel and son Dinesh were murdered.

On the other side of the road stood a mangled red Bolero that must have been thrown off by a landmine blast. Its condition suggested none of its occupants had any chance of coming out alive. None did.

Yet, strangely, some of the party flags attached to the assorted jeeps and sports utility vehicles (SUV) survived the blast and firing. They lay limp in the windless evening amid the bamboo, sal and teak.

Party flags and stickers can still be seen all along the road to Sukma, with hoardings showing leaders who are now dead, calling people to join the wave of “parivartan (change)”.