Two men whose accounts suggest that the police in Andhra Pradesh staged the killing of 20 alleged red sanders smugglers last week will appear before the National Human Rights Commission in Delhi today.The men claim that at least 12 of those shot dead were pulled off a bus by Andhra policemen and arrested hours before the alleged encounter.
The two men and the wife of one of them will be taken to the rights body by activists who have demanded a thorough investigation into the controversial killings in the forests of Chittoor last Tuesday.
The Andhra Pradesh police claim that the men were notorious smugglers of red sandalwood or red sanders and were killed after they attacked a police team. They claimed that the team was outnumbered and fired in self-defence.
All the men were from neighbouring Tamil Nadu.
Activists have raised questions about the police version, pointing at the state of the bodies. Some of the bodies have burn marks; others show bullet injuries in the chest and head, which activists say challenge the police claim of self-defence.
The two witnesses claim they survived because they were not among the villagers taken away by the Andhra police.
One of them says he was seated separately, next to a woman, on a bus from Tiruttani in Tamil Nadu to Renigunta in Andhra Pradesh while the others from his village were pulled out.
The other man has said that he was travelling with a group of seven men and missed the bus because he went for a drink.
He alleges that when he called one of his companions, he learnt that they had been taken off the bus and were at a police station. He said he later learnt that they had been killed in the police action.
Andhra Pradesh forest minister B Gopala Krishna Reddy has said there is evidence that men who were killed were “habitual offenders” in trading red sandalwood illegally.
