Indian police discovered five more bodies of women and children on Wednesday after a "barbaric" rampage by tribal separatists targeting Muslims in north-east Assam, taking the total number killed to 43.
The bodies were found as authorities continued their search of two districts in the remote tea-growing state where masked gunmen last week shot dead Muslim villagers, including babies, as they slept.
Police have accused tribal Bodo rebels of killing the Muslims, whose migrant community has been locked for years in land disputes with the indigenous group in the state, which borders Bhutan and Bangladesh.
Local media have reported that Bodos attacked the Muslims as punishment for failing to vote for their candidate last month in the country's mammoth staggered election, which is drawing to a close.
The Assam chief minister, Tarun Gogoi, told reporters from the worst-hit Narayanguri village: "So far the death toll is put at 43. The killings were indeed barbaric, with even a five-month-old baby not spared. It is unfortunate that bodies are still being recovered and we have reports that 11 more people are missing."
A police spokesman travelling with Gogoi said the bodies of three children and two women were the latest found in the district of Baksa, about 130 miles west of Assam's main city of Guwahati.
The death toll has climbed from at least 32 on Sunday after a series of bodies were discovered in recent days, while several people wounded in the carnage on 1-2 May have also died in hospital.
Gogoi said 15 children, aged between eight months and 14 years, had been left orphaned by the bloodshed and were being sent to a charity-run home in Guwahati.
Villagers cried as they recalled their ordeals, while others pleaded with officials travelling with the chief minister to help shift them to hospital for treatment.
"I saw my mother and father dying in front of me. I managed to save myself hiding under the bed as masked gunmen put bullets in my parents," 14-year-old Habiba Nessa told AFP.
Security forces are searching for the Bodo guerrillas blamed for the violence, which has forced several thousand people to flee their homes in fear, officials have said.
The violence came during the final stretch of the general election, which has seen religious and ethnic tensions flare and which the Hindu nationalist hardliner Narendra Modi and his opposition party are expected to win.
