Indian police have rearrested Irom Sharmila who has been on hunger strike for 14 years to protest against rights abuses, just two days after she was released on a court order.
A senior Manipur police officer Santosh Macherla said a team of policewomen dragged the frail activist away from the tin shack that is the site of her protest on Friday morning, NDTV reported.
She resisted the police, struggling and screaming, and her supporters shouted and wept, but to no avail.
Sharmila will have to be produced in court in 24 hours.
Manipur's Deputy Chief Minister said Sharmila had been arrested after a medical exam showed that she is critical.
"We are taking care of her life. She is insisting on fasting. If her health is deteriorating, we have to take care," he said.
Irom Sharmila was last force-fed on Wednesday afternoon before she was released from jail.
On 2 November 2000, in Malom, a town in the Imphal Valley of Manipur, ten civilians were shot and killed while waiting at a bus stop.
The incident, known as the "Malom Massacre,” was allegedly committed by the Assam Rifles, one of the Indian Paramilitary forces operating in the state.
Sharmila, who was 28 at the time, began to fast in protest of the killings, taking neither food nor water.
Three days after she began her strike, she was arrested by the police and charged with an "attempt to commit suicide."
Irom Sharmila continued to face the charge of attempted suicide since then. She has been regularly released and re-arrested every year since her hunger strike began.
On August 19, a court in Imphal ordered that Sharmila should be released from custody "if not required in any other case", stating that the defence had "failed miserably" to demonstrate that Sharmila had intended to commit suicide through fasting.
Having refused food and water for more than 500 weeks, she has been called "the world's longest hunger striker".
