Family of slain children in Manipur demands perpetrators be arrested and punished

Family of slain children in Manipur demands justice as tensions rise amid ongoing ethnic conflict and government efforts for peace.

Days after two children in Manipur were killed in an alleged bomb attack on the house of a Meitei family in Bishnupur’s Tronglaobi, leading to tensions rising once again in the State, the children’s grandfather on Thursday (April 9, 2026) virtually addressed a press conference, calling for the immediate arrest of the perpetrators, who he believed were “Kuki militants”.

At the press conference organised by Meitei civil society organisations in New Delhi on Thursday (April 9), Oinam Babuton, the paternal grandfather of the children who were killed in the attack, said, “There has to be an end to Meitei civilians being attacked and killed by these militants.” One of the children was five years old, and the other was his 5-month-old sister.

The April 7 morning attack on the family’s home in Tronglaobi killed the children in their sleep and seriously injured their mother, a Guwahati-based nurse on maternity leave. Her husband, a Border Security Force personnel, is posted outside Manipur.

The attack has once again escalated tensions in the State, even as the newly installed Manipur government works to restore normalcy after years of unrest following the ethnic conflict between the Kuki-Zo and Meitei communities that erupted in May 2023, the State government said.

At the presser in New Delhi, civil society organisations (CSOs) representing the Meitei community, such as the Meitei Heritage Society, Delhi Manipur Society, and others, called for “exemplary punishment” for the perpetrators of this attack, dismantling of the “infrastructure of Kuki militancy”, and fixing accountability for the failure to prevent such attacks.

The civil society organisations, in a statement, said that the failure to prevent such attacks, “reinforces growing perception among the general public that Kuki militants are being deliberately treated with softness for other vested interests”.