Seshachalam killing: SIT says no evidence of 'encounter'

'This was expected. Did you really expect a SIT formed by the Andhra government to find their cops guilty? It was a farce from the beginning.'
A Ganesh Nadar/Rediff.com reports.

On April 7, 2015, the Andhra Pradesh police shot dead 20 suspected woodcutters in the Seshachalam forest in the state's Chittoor district who were suspected to be helping red sanders smugglers.

The men were labourers from Tamil Nadu. The police and forest department officials claimed the men attacked them with stones and sickles.

Later there were revelations that the men had been arrested on buses coming from Tamil Nadu, let loose in the forest and shot at point blank range.

The idea was to discourage men from Tamil Nadu from entering the forests of Andhra Pradesh.

The National Human Rights Commission sent its officials to investigate the encounter. The NHRC later asked for a Central Bureau of Investigation inquiry into the incident.

After the Andhra Pradesh high court halted the inquiry, the state government constituted a Special Investigation Team to probe the encounter.

A year later the SIT has submitted its report to a court in Tirupati. The SIT report says there is lack of evidence to say that the 20 men were killed in a fake encounter. The final report will be submitted on July 8.

If the court feels the report is incorrect, then it can order a CBI inquiry.

"This was expected. Did you really expect a SIT formed by the Andhra government to find their cops guilty?" asks S Balamurugan, general secretary, People's Union of Civil Liberties in Tamil Nadu.

"It was a farce from the beginning," the civil rights activist adds. "The inspector in charge of the SIT is an encounter specialist. Do you expect him to find others guilty of something he does regularly? We will demand a CBI inquiry."

"There is no need to wait till July, 8 to ask for a CBI inquiry," Balamurugan says. "The final report will say the same thing. If they had asked me last year I could have told them that a SIT from Andhra is incapable of finding evidence."

The victims, Balamurugan feels, can expect justice only if a CBI inquiry is conducted under the supervision of the high court.

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