Questions grow over death of 8 suspects at hands of Indian police

New Delhi: Eight suspects awaiting trial on terrorism charges slit the throat of a guard, scaled the high walls and escaped from a central Indian prison before dawn on Monday. Within hours, the police found them at a village a few kilometres away and killed them in a gun battle.

But now the number of questions about what really happened is growing. How did they manage to scale the high walls of the prison with just bedspreads? Did they want to surrender to the police later? Were they armed? Was it cold blooded murder?

An amateur cell phone video captured by an onlooker in the central state of Madhya Pradesh — broadcast on television channels here — showed some of the men standing on a hilltop with raised hands.

One policemen is heard saying, “Wait, they are trying talk to us.”

In another video, a policeman looks at the bodies of the men lying on the ground: “He is alive, Kill him!” he says and an officer shoots the inert body.

The questions have not only cast an uncomfortable spotlight on India’s dodgy record of extrajudicial killings by police but also the government’s increasing discomfort with public scrutiny on counterterror operations.

“We should stop this habit of raising doubts, and questioning the authorities and the police. This is not a good culture,” said Kiren Rijiju, the junior home minister. “But we are observing in India that people have developed this habit of raising unnecessary questions. Merely on the basis of some videos, you cannot raise alarm bells.”

The inmates were members of an Islamist student group called the Students Islamic Movement of India that was banned for terror-related activities in 2001, and they were being tried on charges of terror incidents, sedition and robbery.

“The police had no choice but to kill them. They were dreaded terrorists,” Bhupendra Singh, a minister in the Madhya Pradesh government, told news television channel NDTV 24X7. Police said they recovered four firearms and three sharp weapons from the dead men.

Such killings have always been controversial in India. The police call such chase-and-shoot operations of fleeing suspects “encounter killings,” but civil rights activists prefer the term “extra judicial killings,” and accuse the police of finding short cuts to bypass the long delays in India’s overburdened court system.

In response to the rising concerns about Monday’s killings, the government announced that the National Investigation Agency will probe the incident. But Digvijaya Singh, a senior leader of the opposition Congress party said the probe must be monitored by a court.

“The opposition is playing petty politics, they do not have even two tears for the policeman who was killed,” said Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the chief minister of the state on Tuesday after he visited the slain policeman’s family. “Terrorists have been killed. Who knows what they would have done after escaping. But the opposition is bringing down the sky for such people.”