PUNE, 20 June 2006 — Fumbling to find answers to questions on the alleged fake encounter in Nagpur in which three suspected terrorists of Lashkar-e-Taiba were killed, Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister R.R. Patil said investigations were in progress to find out if those killed had terrorist links.
Speaking to Arab News yesterday after a function here, a disturbed and gloomy Patil fumbled for answers and gave evasive replies.
Patil said he had read about the NGO panel report and that the police were still investigating the matter. “We will find out if those killed were militants or innocent people. At the moment I can only say that the police had received intelligence reports of a militant attack on the RSS headquarters in Nagpur six months ago.” he said. Patil evaded the question as to whether the allegations by the panel of a fake encounter were true.
The evasive replies by Patil only lend more credibility to the allegations of the panel that the encounter was fake and also raise doubts whether it was part of a conspiracy to eliminate innocent Muslims to show and pump up the propaganda that the state government was tackling terrorism with an iron hand.
Questions are also now being asked as to whether the panel report means the whole encounter theory was faked by the police. Were the three alleged terrorists killed in some other place and then dumped near the RSS headquarters? Or were the innocent people killed by RSS elements with the help of the police, a story cooked up by the RSS and the police to implicate Muslims? The fake encounter theory has snowballed into a major controversy and has put the Congress-led Democratic Front government into a tight spot. The panel report has exposed the police claims as false and misleading.
The report says that almost all the information pertaining to the encounter was provided to the media by the police and thus the media reports were conflicting and left innumerable questions on ground zero situation unanswered.
The police claim of having liquidated the terrorists with deadly weapons and ammunitions with ease suggested that the police team had a “cake walk” over the deadly terrorists. The confounding reports in the media and doubts aired by the people of Nagpur and various party leaders, was enough to read between the lines. The “IIslamist terrorist” attempting to attack the RSS headquarters has a larger implication and as such the confounding report of the “encounter” requires an honest study, the panel said.
The panel in its report also revealed that the team visited the Government Medical College in Nagpur to seek details of the postmortem of the three alleged terroists. But the dean of the college refused to divulge any information stating that it was “classified”.
Now since the report has exposed several flaws in the encounter theory of the police, the conclusion drawn is that innocent Muslims were killed in the name of curbing terrorism. Unfortunately, the voice of this fake encounter has been raised by the Hindu members of the NGO team while there is no protest from the Muslims against this barbaric act against humanity.
