The Telangana Police on Monday handed over the bodies of nine suspected Maoists, who were killed last week in an encounter in Chhattisgarh, to their families.

A joint team of the Telangana and Chattisgarh Police on Friday said they had killed 10 suspected Maoists, including senior Maoist leader Hari Bushan, in Dantewada district’s Pukari Kanker region. Sushil Kumar, a junior commando of the Greyhounds, an anti-Maoist force, was also killed in the encounter while two others were injured.

The body of Dadaboina Swamy alias Prabhakar, a member of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) group, was claimed on Sunday, but the bodies of nine others were kept in a mortuary at the Government Area Hospital in Bhadrachalam in Telangana, PTI reported.

“Family members of the [remaining nine] Maoists reached the hospital this afternoon,” Assistant Superintendent of Police Sunil Dutt said. “After due identification, all nine bodies were handed over to the kin. Postmortem was already done and the bodies were kept at the mortuary.”

The police said they have increased vigil in the forest areas of Bhadrachalam Agency to ensure there are no retaliatory attacks from Maoists, according to The Hindu. Joint squads of the district police and the Central Reserve Police Force have been deployed in some areas in Telangana that share the border with insurgency-hit Bastar division of Chhattisgarh, officials told the daily.