( dpa )- Three paramilitary soldiers were killed in a gunbattle with Maoist rebels on Sunday as security forces intensified their search for rebels responsible for killing 13 policemen in India's eastern Orissa state, officials and media reports said.
A group of more than 300 rebels had escaped with a large cache of arms and ammunition after attacking three police installations and a government armoury in Orissa's Nayagarh district late on Friday.
The police and paramilitary soldiers were carrying out intense combing operations in the jungles of Nayagarh bordering Ganjam district where the rebels were suspected to have fled, IANS news agency reported quoting Orissa Home Department secretary Tushar Kanti Misra.
"Three security personnel were killed in a gunbattle (with the rebels) at Gosna hill in Ganjam," Misra was quoted as saying.
Orissa police chief Gopal Chandra Nanda said the gunbattle at Gosna hill, about 300 kilometres south-west of state capital Bhubaneshwar, which began on Saturday night, was still continuing.
The security forces had surrounded a group of militants but were finding the going difficult as most of them were not trained in jungle warfare and the rebels were heavily armed, PTI news agency reported quoting an unnamed senior police official.
The official said the rebels had 1,163 rifles and 80 pistols along with more than 100,000 rounds of bullets that they had looted from an armoury and a police training school on Friday.
Meanwhile, an alert has been sounded in Orissa's neighbouring Jharkhand state to prevent the rebels from escaping across the border. The forests along the border of Jharkhand and Orissa are a hotbed of Maoist activity.
Jharkhand and Orissa are two of 13 states in India where Maoist rebels operate in a "red corridor" running from southern Andhra Pradesh to the border of Nepal in the north.
The various rebel groups claim to be fighting for the rural poor, tribal people and the landless and usually target police and government installations.
Thousands of people, mostly police and paramilitary personnel and government officials, have been killed in the insurgency since the late 1960s.