Imphal, Nov 8 (IANS): At least eight houses were burnt after the armed militants attacked a tribal-dominated village in Manipur's Jiribam district, police said on Friday.

A police official in Imphal said that armed guerrillas attacked the Hmar tribal-inhabited village Zairon in Jiribam on Thursday night and set at least eight houses on fire.

He said that during the sudden attack, villagers, including children, women, and elderly people, managed to flee to safer places. Security forces led by senior police officials rushed to the village and brought the situation under control.

The extremists, however, managed to flee before the security personnel reached the area.

The Indigenous Tribal Leaders' Forum (ITLF), an apex body of tribals in Manipur, claimed that gunfire continued for about an hour and that a woman was burnt alive.

"During the attack, more than ten houses were set ablaze. A woman named Sangkim, wife of Ngurthansang Hmar from Zairon, had been burnt by the fire which engulfed her home. Local sources report that the remains of her burned body were later dismembered by the militants," the ITLF alleged.

Meanwhile, recently two abandoned farmhouses were also set on fire by suspected militants in the Nungkhal area in the same district.

The mixed-populated Jiribam district, adjoining Assam, has witnessed several incidents of violence this year, though the overall situation in the district had been relatively peaceful even after ethnic violence broke out in many other districts of the northeastern state since May last year.

Seventeen months after the ethnic violence erupted in Manipur, the Ministry of Home Affairs held the first meeting in Delhi on October 15 with all three major communities -- Meitei, Kuki, and Naga -- in a bid to find a way to a peaceful solution to the unrest.