The National Human Rights Commission pulled up the Telangana Police for not furnishing full details of the Alair encounter in which 5 undertrials were killed.
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has pulled up the Telangana Police for not furnishing complete details related to the Alair encounter in which five undertrials were killed in police firing on April 7.
Expressing suspicion over the intentions of the police, the NHRC, during its hearing on the case in Hyderabad on Thursday, directed the Telangana Police to furnish post-mortem, forensic and magisterial enquiry reports on the encounter.
The Commission will decide the future course of action in this case after receipt of these reports.
Several prominent Muslim organisations submitted separate memoranda seeking the intervention of the National Human Rights Commission into the encounter.
Five undertrials, Viquar Ahmed, Syed Amjed, Mohd. Zakir, Mohd. Haneef and Izhar Khan, were killed by the Telangana police on April 7 between Jangaon and Aleru, while they were proceeding to Hyderabad for a court trial in Nampally Court in Cr. No. 87/2010 of the Hussaini Alam PS / SIT CCS, Hyderabad.
"All of them were brutally murdered in the police van itself while they were handcuffed. The circumstantial evidences do not support the police theory that they tried to escape by snatching weapons. The forensic evidences and the preliminary findings of the post-mortem report clearly point out that the encounter was fake. All the undertrials had multiple bullet injuries. It is illogical to believe that about 20 armed police personnel failed to overpower five handcuffed undertrials, even if the latter had tried to escape. All of them were shot at point-blank range with the sole objective of shoot-to-kill," alleged Tahreek Muslim Shabban president and Telangana Muslim Joint Action Committee chairman Mohammed Mushtaq Mallik in his petition submitted to the NHRC.
Meanwhile, Warangal IG Naveen Chand, who appeared before the Commission, maintained that the encounter was genuine and that the undertrial prisoners tried to snatch weapons and escape. Consequently, they were killed in an exchange of fire, he claimed.
Mohammed Ahmed, father of undertrial Viqar who was killed in the encounter, also submitted a petition before the NHRC seeking an independent probe into the matter.
Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee represented by Satish Kumar, Jeevan Kumar and Lateef Mohammed Khan; Telangana Forum For Justice represented by Rama Malkote; Help Hyderabad represented by Major SM Quadri; and Faheem Qureshi of All India Jamaitul Quraish Action Committee also made representations before the commission arguing that the encounter was fake.
Speaking to media persons later, Mushtaq Mallik alleged that the Telangana Police had lied before the Commission and tried to distort the facts. He claimed that the police officials wrongly claimed that the five undertrials were not handcuffed, but that some old chains were tied to their hands.
They had also misled the NHRC by stating that they had sent a radio message to them about the encounter, Mallik alleged. The NHRC members had also expressed surprise on hearing that they had been sent a radio message by the police.
The Commission also questioned the absence of the jail authorities before it, he said.
The TMJAC chief also brought to the notice of the NHRC that the state government, in its GO Ms No 184 ordering an SIT probe, addressed the undertrails as "terror operatives". He said that none of them had been convicted by a court of law on terror charges. Therefore, the approach of the government towards the incident clearly showed that it was not serious on conducting a fair probe into the matter, he alleged. (INN)