Police said the gunmen are suspected members of a militant wing of the National Democratic Front of Bodoland. They fired at a private chartered bus near Bhoimari village, about 150 miles north of Assam's main city of Guwahati.

"The NDFB fired at the bus, forcing the driver to stop, after which the militants lined up all the passengers on the road and took away at least 10 of them at gunpoint," Assam Police Chief Shankar Baruah said.

Many were shot in the nearby forest, he said. "All the dead were Hindi-speaking people hailing from Bihar and were Arunachal Pradesh (state) government employees," Baruah said.

Police recovered the bodies of eight people from a thickly wooded area.

Police, army and paramilitary soldiers are searching the area for the gunmen and several missing passengers.

In a separate incident, heavily armed militants killed at least five people, including a woman, around 6 p.m. in a market in Belseri village, close to the first attack near Bhoimari village. All the victims in the Belseri attack were also Hindi.

The Bodos are a culturally separate group in Assam who are mostly Hindus or Christians. They account for about 10 percent of Assam's nearly 27 million people and live in the western and northern parts of the state.

Assam, a major producer and exporter of tea, has a literacy rate of around 64 percent. About 65 percent of the population is Hindi and 30 percent Muslim. Christians make up less than 4 percent.

The state is poor by Indian standards with little industry. Its gross domestic product has been sluggish during the past decade, averaging slightly more than 3 percent, whereas India as a nation has been around 6 percent or more.

Police said the brutal assaults by a breakaway group of the NDFB are revenge attacks for recent government successes as authorities attempt to break a cycle of violence that has gripped the remote and mountainous Himalayan state. This week security forces killed an NDFB rebel during a gun battle.

Earlier this month, the NDFB threatened to kill at least 20 people for every one of their members killed by security forces, an NDFB statement to local media said.

"From today onwards, if any innocent NDFB cadres are killed by Indian forces in the name of a fake encounter then the Bodoland Army (armed wing of the NDFB) would take action against any Indian," deputy chief of the militant Bodoland Army, B. Jwngkhang, said via e-mail.

"One innocent Bodo would be equal to 20 Indian or maybe more and we don't care who they are, maybe Indian civilians or Indian forces."

A moderate faction of the NDFB has agreed a cease-fire with state authorities in 2005 as put forward in a peace process by Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi.

The Indian government, which backs Gogoi's plan, appointed former intelligence bureau chief P.C. Haldar to talk to rebel groups in Assam.

But security forces continue their crackdown on militants outside the peace process, or at least until they enter into it.

The militant group's chairman, Ranjan Daimary, was arrested in Bangladesh this year and handed over to stand trial in Assam. He faces charges of masterminding the October 2008 bomb explosions that killed 87 people.

The rebel military wing chief, B. Sanjiabath, is still active with nearly 100 guerrillas, police estimate.

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