Rebels strike chopper, kills army troops in Peru

Marxist Shining Path rebels attacked an army helicopter in southeastern Peru on Wednesday, killing two army troops, the Armed Forces Joint Command said.

Army special operations choppers were patrolling the valley where the Apurimac River and Ene River flow when the rebels attacked at 2230 GMT, the statement said.

The victims were Lieutenant Colonel Ernesto Vasquez Silva and Captain Alberto Vidarte Campos, it added.

The Shining Path is a militant Maoist organization that carried out terror attacks across Peru in the 1980s and 1990s, with the goal of replacing what it saw as bourgeois democracy with "new democracy."

The group however has withered since the capture of its leader Abimael Guzman in 1992 and a fierce crackdown by then-president Alberto Fujimori.

Shining Path "remnant forces," along with a handful of young recruits, number around 400 and have been active alongside gangs of drug traffickers in remote places like the river valley region where Wednesday's attack took place.

The clash comes not yet two months after Ollanta Humala, a leftist former army officer who battled the Shining Path earlier in his career, took office as president on July 28.

Some 70,000 people were killed between 1980 and 2000 as the Peruvian government crushed the Shining Path and a rival leftist guerrilla group, the Tupac Amaru movement, according to Peru's independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

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