Bijapur, June 23 -- The family of a 35-year-old man killed in a gunfight with security forces in Bijapur has alleged that he was a mid-day meal cook at a local government school and was killed in a "staged encounter", with the police maintaining that the deceased was a member of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). The deceased, identified as Mahesh Kodiyam, was a resident of Irpagutta village in the district and was killed in the June 10 operation in Indravati National Park in which senior Maoist leaders - Gautam alias Sudhakar, a Central Committee member of the CPI (Maoist), and Bhaskar Rao, a state committee member of the same group - were killed. Kodiyam's family, however, has now said that he bore no connection to the extremists. "He was innocent. We are poor but law-abiding," Mahesh's widow, Sumitra Kodiyam, said. Narrating a sequence of events from June 9, Sumitra, a mother of seven, said, "My husband had gone to the forest to fetch our cattle. By evening, he hadn't returned. Later, we heard from villagers he had been taken by security forces and the next day, he was declared a Maoist and shot dead in the encounter." Kodiyam's employer, Ramesh Uppal, said he joined the school as a cook in 2023. "Mahesh joined us as a mid-day meal cook in 2023... He was last present at the school in April this year," said Uppal. The June 10 encounter was hailed as the third big successful operation in a fortnight with security forces pushing relentlessly against the Maoists with the aim of ending Left-wing extremism by March 2026. In a statement issued on Sunday in response to the family's statement, Bastar police said the killing took place during a series of anti-Maoist operations....