NAGPUR, 19 June 2006 — The Nagpur Police found itself placed in the dock by a fact-finding team comprising members of several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) which challenged the authenticity of the police version of the encounter near the RSS headquarters in which three alleged Lashkar-e-Taiba militants were killed. Surprisingly all the members of the fact-finding team are Hindus.
The NGO fact-finding team is led by B.G. Kolse-Patil, a retired judge of the Bombay High Court, who has dismissed outright the police version of the June 1 police encounter and demanded a probe into the encounter by a retired judge of the Supreme Court.
The team also consists of members from the People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights (CPDR), Dharm-Nirpeksh Nagrik Manch, Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee, Indian Association of People’s Lawyers and Bahujan Sangarsh Samiti.
The team had posed several questions on the police encounter, which by and large have no satisfactory answer from the police.
Going on the defensive, Nagpur Police Commissioner Shiv Prasad Singh Yadav hit back at the NGO team, hinting that there was a link between the fact-finding team and the terrorists.
“There is a dire need now to verify the credentials of the team members who have prepared the report. We need to find out more about the frontal organizations of the terrorists. We cannot rule out links between the team and the terrorists. We need to find out who the team members actually are,” said Yadav.
Refuting the fact-finding report, Yadav stated that the claims in the report were highly irrational and said that the report speaks of the police having no training, that some of them were on punishment posting, and as to why his deputy did not speak to the media on the encounter spot. The city police chief ridiculed the finding of the team. To the observation of the team that terrorists did not carry identities, Yadav failed to give a convincing answer and said that “some actually do that occasionally.”
The team posed a number of mind-boggling questions to the police on the encounter in its report. It asked that when the police had prior information about the possible attack, why did they trail the suspects’ vehicle so long and allowed it to reach close to the RSS headquarters? How did the lone policeman, who the police claim, asked the terrorists about their intentions? For this, the report said, the police vehicle must have come close to the suspect car in which case, the policeman must have been exposed to attack from the terrorist. How did he escape unhurt?
The other question posed was that when there was no eyewitness to the encounter, how were the bodies removed even before the media persons reached the spot and why? The police claimed that the alleged terrorists tried to force their way through the barricades leading to the RSS headquarters. Where were the guards of the barricades then?
The encounter took place for 20 minutes, then how did the police prevent the alleged terrorists from using the dozen hand grenades and the 360 rounds of bullets they had? The report says that it fails to appeal to the common sense that despite having so much of ammunition the terrorists fought a “hopeless” battle without using any of them.
The fact-finding report suggests foul play in the encounter and hints that it was fake and a “managed” one.
The report has also nailed several lies of the police, point by point and indicates that the encounter was totally a work of fabrication.