A policeman stands guard in the Andhra forest on Tuesday as mediapersons film bodies of those who were gunned down. (AFP)
Chennai, April 8: Senior Tamil Nadu police officers, who did not want to be identified, today challenged the claim of Andhra Pradesh police that they had killed 20 alleged red sanders smugglers in Chittoor district early yesterday in self-defence.
"By all accounts there was no encounter but plain cold-blooded killing," said a senior police officer.
All the men gunned down in the Seshachalam forests belong to villages from Thiruvallur, Thiruvannamalai and Vellore districts in Tamil Nadu, bordering Andhra Pradesh.
Tamil Nadu has announced a compensation of Rs 3 lakh each for the families of the dead. The state is also planning to approach the National Human Rights Commission with the material collected by its police force that counters the Andhra police claim that they opened fire after coming under attack from around 100 smugglers, who targeted them with sickles and other sharp weapons.
"First, no one in the task force suffered any major injuries to justify such a response. More important, the two spots where the firings reportedly happened showed no signs of any struggle or battle. Instead, two of our intelligence officers who were at the spot within two hours after information reached us found the bodies lined up, with bags, water sachets and chappals in matching pairs lying next to them, which exposed that the whole thing was set up post-mortem," the Tamil Nadu officer said.
Had the task force opened fire on a mob, the men would have started to run helter-skelter and would have got shot in any part of the body, especially the back or the legs, the officer said. Instead, all the 20 had bullet wounds either on their chest or on the forehead or the face, suggesting they were shot at close quarters after being secured.
"Also, the wounds would have looked fresh if they had been shot between 5am and 6am on Tuesday. Instead they looked at least a day old and a couple of bodies also had burn marks on them, as if there had been an attempt to cremate them," another senior officer said.
An officer who had served in Vellore district and had nabbed a few red sanders smugglers with the contraband argued that the logs found next to the bodies were another giveaway.
"None of them was freshly cut and instead had rounded edges as if they had been retrieved from one of the godowns. Also they had the dried look and paint patches on them - probably to cover the case numbers painted on them after they had been seized on a previous occasion," the officer explained.
Red sanders is a protected wood with a global demand and is found almost exclusively in southern Andhra.
A red sanders smuggler had told Vellore police that five of the dead had been taken away from a bus as it neared Chittoor on Sunday night.
"We were going to fetch red sanders but the five people who were found killed were in the bus with me and were spotted by the Andhra police as they sat in a group whereas I sat with a woman passenger," the smuggler has allegedly told the police. A senior officer said the smuggler had gone back home to his village and narrated the incident to the panchayat head, who took him to the police.
A senior officer pointed out that three days ago, "DIG of the task force, M. Kanta Rao, had issued a statement warning red sanders smugglers that he had orders to open fire on smugglers entering the Seshachalam forests. The statement showed that the Andhra police were up to something".
"After the incident, the Andhra police should have ordered an inquiry by a judicial magistrate as required by Section 176 1(A) of the CrPC. Instead the bodies were dispatched to Tirupati for post-mortem without waiting for the judicial magistrate, which proves that there is an attempt to cover up," the officer said.
Most of the dead were from the Vanniyar community that dominates the border belt and the rest are Gounders. "They are not tribals but daily wage labourers who live on the foothills of Javvaadhu Hills in Tamil Nadu and venture into the hills to cut and collect firewood. Since they are used to the rough terrain, they are employed by the red sanders smugglers to fetch the trees from Andhra," the officer said.
A few lawyers from Tamil Nadu are planning a PIL in the Supreme Court seeking a CBI probe.
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