Protesters burn tyres on Imphal-Dimapur highway in Manipur on Friday. Picture by Eastern Projections

Imphal, Dec. 19: Police lobbed teargas shells and exploded stun bombs to disperse protesters who went on the rampage along the Imphal-Dimapur highway, damaging over a score of vehicles, including supply trucks.

The highway is one of the two lifelines of Manipur. Residents of Sekmai clamped a blockade of the highway yesterday in protest against the killing of Maharabam Rajen Singh, a pork seller of Sekmai bazaar, by unidentified men on December 13 at his Sekmai residence. The two gunmen had calmly walked in and fired at Rajen from close range.

The joint action committee, formed to get justice for Rajen, called the bandh demanding the arrest of the killers as well as a clarification from them on why they killed the pork seller. It had even set a deadline for the arrest and launched the blockade when it expired on December 17.

No group claimed responsibility for the killing.

A police crackdown cleared the traffic for a while yesterday. Three protesters were injured yesterday.

Reports said more than 20 vehicles, including supply trucks and private vehicles, were damaged as protesters threw stones using catapults.

The police provided security escorts for supply trucks and inter-state buses from today. “We are providing security escorts to vehicles to allow them cross the blockade-hit highway. However, whenever the police left, the protesters returned, put up road blocks and attacked the vehicles,” a police officer said.

The committee said the blockade would continue until it received a positive response from the government.

“There has been no response to our demands either from the government or the perpetrators of the crime. We will continue to block the road,” Shanti Devi, a spokesperson for the committee said. She said the government had not sent any feelers for talks.

The police were clueless about the killers.

“We have registered a case and investigations are on. We are trying to find out the victim’s antecedents. We suspect that the killers could be militants as they walked into the victim’s house and committed the crime in cold blood. But we do not have any clue at this moment,” a police source said.