Hyderabad based Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee (CLMC), hsa condemned unlawful killing of 20 laborers by the Andhra Pradesh police, and demanded for registration of murder case against the police personnel involved. Reproduced below their press release.
Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee slams the extra judicial killing of 20 laborers on the name of sandalwood smugglers in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh. These killings are nothing but a massacre by the Andhra Pradesh government led by Chandrababu Naidu. It should be noted that it is the history of Chandrababu Naidu that whenever he was Chief Minister, these kinds of encounter killings took place and all those were fake encounters. Chandrababu Naidu is so notorious that he was over thrown from the power in the year 2004 due to his anti people policies, grave human rights violations and killing of poor people in the name of encounters.
Now the Andhra Pradesh is divided into two regions i.e. Andhra and Telangana and the ruled by two different chief ministers i.e. Chandrababu Naidu and Chandrashekhar Rao. But one thing is common in both their nature that they are always anti-people and carrying encounters is their culture. Because, both of them have come from the same school of thought i.e. from Telugu Desam Party (TDP). Chandrababu Naidu is specialist in suppressing the peoples’ movement and cooking false stories to prove encounters as genuine.
Here in this case, the state is saying that these 20 persons who were killed by the police are sandalwood smugglers and when these persons were cutting down the trees, the policemen saw them and asked them to surrender. Instead of surrendering themselves, these persons started attacking them by pelting stones. In the self defense police opened fire killing 20 persons and injuring 8 more persons. This committee wants to state that the story of the state government is out of imagination and fooling the people. The questions arising in the minds of common people are that, if at all those persons had become so violent then there are ways to tackle them by means of rubber bullets firing or opening fire in the air. But in this case the bullets have pierced the vital parts of the body. Here the intention of the police was not to control or arrest those persons but their only aim was to kill people.
It is very clear with this incident that there is no value of human life, but sandalwood is precious that human lives. Civil Liberties strongly condemns the murder of the 20 persons and demands immediate arrest and suspension of all police personnel who were present in the encounter. CLMC demands that the Andhra Pradesh chief minister to take responsibility of these murders and explain how they have drawn conclusion that they were ‘sandalwood smugglers’. CLMC also questions the Chief Minister, Chandrababu Naidu that when custodians of law become the encounter killing gang, then it becomes greater challenge to the whole civil society and it leads to the situation making it bad to worse. Therefore the murders of 20 people assume greater and grave concern as they reveal the police power to kill people with impunity.
The police are not above the law so when the police killed 20 persons it is must for the government to register the criminal cases under the section 302 IPC and immediately suspend those police personnel till the completion of the trial.
