BHUBANESWAR, India - Hundreds of Maoist militants stormed six police compounds in eastern India in carefully coordinated attacks Friday night, killing 12 police personnel and one civilian, a top police official said. Twelve more policemen were injured.

The attacks - on four police stations, one training academy and an armory - were scattered across the Nayagarh district, about 60 miles from Bhubaneswar, the capital of Orissa state, said Gopal Chandra Nanda, director general of the state police. The area is about 1,100 miles southeast of capital New Delhi.

Nanda said about 400 of the militants, known as Naxalites, were involved in the attacks, and that security forces were combing the area in search of them.

Nanda said the attackers seized about 1,000 stolen pistols. Press Trust of India news agency reported that the rebels fled with the arms in a bus that they had hijacked earlier, but Nanda said he was unable to confirm the report.

The rebels, who say they are inspired by Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong, have been fighting for more than three decades in several Indian states, demanding land and jobs for agricultural laborers and the poor.

They are called Naxalites after Naxalbari, a village in West Bengal state where the movement was born in 1967.

Over the past few years, about 2,000 people - police, militants and civilians caught in the middle - have been killed in Naxalite violence.

In March last year 55 policemen and government-backed militiamen were killed when hundreds of rebels attacked an isolated police station in eastern Chhattisgarh state with gunfire, hand grenades and gasoline bombs, in one of the bloodiest attacks of the decades-long insurgency.