Suspected Maoists gunned down the village sarpanch of Chindugarh village near Koleng in Bastar district of Chhattisgarh on Saturday. Officials suspect that the sarpanch was a police informer.

Earlier in June, a local Congress leader Chhannuram Mandavi (55), formerly a sarpanch, was killed allegedly by Maoists who accused him of being a police informer in Chhattisgarh’s Dantewada district. Following the incident, the Congress accused the ruling BJP of failing to provide security to the opposition party’s leaders in Bastar region.

A recent report by the Chhattisgarh government and its anti-Maoist wing show a decrease in numbers of suspected Maoists killed. According to the data, 135 Maoists were killed in 2016. The number falls to nearly half, 76, in 2017.