Hyderabad HC takes control of probe into Seshachalam encounter killings

This comes a day after state govt asked Chittoor SP to hand-over all records pertaining to 'incident of firing' to SIT

Expressing dissatisfaction over the lack of progress in police probe, the Hyderabad high court on Tuesday took control of the investigation  into the Seshachalam killings. Twenty woodcutters from Tamil Nadu were killed in an alleged encounter earlier this month by the anti-red sanders smuggling task force in the Seshachalam forest area of Andhra Pradesh.

The bench, headed by Chief Justice Kalyan Jyothi Sengupta, issued the interim order a day after the Andhra Pradesh government asked the Chittoor superintendent of police (SP) to hand over all the records pertaining to the '’incident of firing’ to the special investigation team (SIT).

The AP government had constituted SIT four days ago in the light of questions being raised over a fair and a thorough investigation. Families of the victims, activists and political parties in Tamil Nadu protested the killings while questioning the task force's claim that it had to open fire only in self-defence.

The day the incident was reported, Tamil Nadu chief minister O Panneerselvam wrote a letter to his AP counterpart, N Chandrababu Naidu, seeking a fast and fair inquiry.

Placing the probe team under the sole control of the high court, the bench directed the SIT members not to take orders from any minister state authority during the course of investigation. The two-judge bench also directed the team to complete the probe in 60 days.

After going through the case diary, Justice Gupta and Justice P V Sanjay Kumar said they were not happy with the way things were being handled by the police. They said the case diary contained no details.. not even the names of the officers involved in the alleged encounter nor they could find a direction in the probe, which was supposed to have taken place in the past 20 days after the incident.

After issuing the orders, the court returned the case diary to the investigation officer (IO) asking him to record the details of the investigation and show it to the court again on Friday. When V Raghunath, a petitioner' lawyer, said Ravi Shankar Ayyanar, inspector general of police (IG), and the head of the SIT, himself was known as an 'encounter specialist', the bench asked the petitioners to file affidavits over such objections before the court.

Based on a complaint filed by Muniyammal, wife of Sashi Kumar, who was one of the 20 people who died in the alleged encounter on April 7, the court had earlier directed the police to register an FIR under the sections of murder and abduction against the members of the task force. Other petitioners, including the AP Civil Liberties Committee, also approached the high court for a fair probe into what they had dubbed as a fake encounter.

A re-postmortem on six bodies was conducted earlier this month in Chennai following the directions of the Hyderabad high court, whose jurisdiction extents to both Telangana and Andhra Pradesh states.

Last week, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) announced its own team to probe the encounter, besides expressing dissatisfaction over not ordering a judicial probe into the incident by the AP government.