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LIMA : Shining Path guerrillas ambushed a military convoy in southern Peru, killing at least 12 soldiers and seven civilians in the worst attack in 10 years blamed on the Maoist group, the military said Friday.
"The toll from the attack as far as we know has risen to seven civilians killed and several wounded including some women and children, and twelve members of the military patrol are dead and some others are wounded," the Peruvian armed forces said in a statement.
The ambush occurred Thursday night against a convoy of four army trucks transporting troops and civilians near the Ene-Apurimac river valley, a region where confrontations have risen recently between the military and armed groups described by authorities as "narco-terrorists."
Authorities accuse the Shining Path of involvement in Peru's drug trade, and of using profits to fund its operations.
The military said the attack occurred in Huancavelica department, which is in the Andean mountains about 250 kilometers (155 miles) southeast of the capital Lima.
Defense Minister Antero Flores Araoz had earlier said on a radio broadcast that 16 people -- 12 soldiers and four civilians -- had been killed.
The Shining Path rebel group conducted a brutal insurgent war with some 7,000 guerrillas in an attempt to overthrow the government and install communist rule.
The insurgency left 70,000 people dead, or missing and presumed dead, in the armed campaign between 1980 and 2000, a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission found in 2003.
It said the movement, which had its beginnings in the 1960s in Ayacucho department, one of the poorest in poverty-wracked Peru, used "extreme violence and cruelty" in its attacks on rural villages.
Shining Path founder and leader Abimael Guzman was captured in 1992, and in 2006 was sentenced to life in prison in a retrial for terrorism, murder and other crimes.
Peru's former president from 1990 to 2000, Alberto Fujimori, is currently on trial for human rights violations and has been accused of conducting a "dirty war" strategy to fight the Shining Path and Tupac Amaru insurgents.
The two rebel groups were all but crushed during Fujimori's presidency, though a handful of Shining Path fighters remained active in the Peruvian jungle.
- AFP /ls
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