At least 10 suspected militants have been killed in an encounter with the Assam Rifles in Manipur’s Chandel district bordering Myanmar.

The army said in a statement late on Wednesday night on X that an Assam Rifles unit under the Spear Corps launched the encounter earlier in the day based on “specific intelligence on the movement of armed cadres” near New Samtal village under Khengjoy subdivision close to the porous India-Myanmar border.

“During the operation, the troops were fired upon by suspected cadres, to which they quickly reacted, redeployed and retaliated in a calibrated and measured manner. In the ensuing firefight, 10 cadres were neutralised and a sizable quantity of arms and ammunition has been recovered. Operation is still in progress,” the Eastern Command of the army said on X.

The army has not shared details of the encounter, including the name of the outfit to which the “neutralised” rebels belonged. Though Naga tribes form the majority in the district, the encounter took place in a Kuki-Zo-dominated area.

Manipur shares a 398km border with Myanmar. Khengjoy is one of the three subdivisions of Chandel, which borders the Sagaing and Chin regions of Myanmar. The village where the encounter took place is around 115km from the Chandel district headquarters.

The gunfight comes amid intensified operations by security forces against militant outfits and the recovery of arms looted during the ongoing conflict between the Meiteis and the Kuki-Zos that erupted on May 3, 2023. Cadres of several insurgent outfits from the Meitei-majority valley and the Kuki-Zo-dominated hill districts have been arrested during the operations.

Manipur is under President’s rule and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act was extended for six months from April 1 in the state, barring 13 police station areas in the Imphal valley. AFSPA gives the security forces unbridled powers to detain, arrest and shoot in areas declared as disturbed.

The last major insurgency-related incident to have taken place in Chandel, where several insurgent outfits are active and whose border militants frequently use to sneak in and out of Myanmar, was on June 4, 2015, when 18 soldiers of the 6 Dogra Regiment were killed in an ambush on an army convoy close to the international border.

There were 46 soldiers in the convoy, which was on its way to Dimapur in Nagaland via Imphal. A few days after the ambush, the army’s special forces carried out a strike a few kilometres inside Myanmar, killing 20 militants from the outfits involved in the ambush.