Mirzapur `Naxals' were surrounded and shot

Mirzapur `Naxals' were surrounded and shot
R.B.SINGH

BHAWANIPUR (MIRZAPUR), MARCH 13: This village is still to recover from the killing of 16 alleged Naxalites last Friday by the police. Eyewitness accounts say they were shot dead after the police surrounded them when they were holding a meeting. Some Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) members among them did open fire at the police but the rest either attempted to flee or were in a mood to surrender. But the 100-strong police party would have none of it and killed them in cold blood, it is alleged.

Among the dead was a 15-year-old boy, Kallu from Khairpur village, who had come to visit his relatives, and four men below 30 -- Ram Awadh, Ram Bharose, Sadhu Narain and Tyagi -- who had no criminal record.

Some of those who were killed were, indeed, members of the MCC, but unlike in Bihar, MP and Andhra Pradesh, there is no ban on the outfit in UP. These men had gathered from different districts for a meeting on the eve of Holi.

An account of the so-called `encounter' was given by the villagers and Sarpanch Satyabrat Singh Patel before whom the entire operation wasconducted. About 100 policemen, led by circle officers of Chunar and Madihan police stations, Jagmohan Shukla and Vipin Kumar Shrivastava, acting on a tip-off given by a landlord of the nearby Rajgarh area, surrounded thevillage at 2 pm and ordered the villagers to vacate their houses andassemble at a place. The policemen, with the help of a local boy, then began advancing towards the house of Bhagwan Das where the meeting was on.

The villagers said the MCC men first opened fire at the policemen from their tamanchas (crude guns), injuring Dilip Singh and Namwar Singh, who were at the front, in their hands. The boy who was leading the police party, Pappu, too, was hurt.

Finding themselves surrounded by the policemen from all sides, some of the men surrendered while the others tried to flee. Instead of making any attempt to catch them, the police fired at everyone in sight and killed them one by one, the villagers said.

After the operation was over by 5 pm, the police allegedly took the bodies tothe police station and then to the Mirzapur civil hospital for post-mortem which was not made public by them.

The villagers said the police had claimed that some of those killed, including one Deonath Kole, were behind the killing of the SHO of Naugarh police station O.P.Singh and constable Ved Prakash during a similar incident at Pappi village, 10 km from Bhawanipur, last October.

The relatives of those killed, including the brother of Deonath, Ram Krit Kole, were not even shown the bodies and not allowed to perform the last rites.``The police refused to hand over the body of my brother though I asked for it,'' he said.

CPI(M-L) and PUCL teams, led by Mohammed Salim, Sharad Mehrotra and Chitranjan Singh, which visited the village, have disputed the police version. They claimed those killed were innocent. PUCL vice-president Singh said he would move the high court to seek a CBI inquiry into the incident.

Chief Minister Rajnath Singh, however, is in no mood to concede the charges. He had rushed to Mirzapur to visit the injured policemen on Sunday and reportedly promised to get them out-of-turn promotions.

He said in Lucknow today that the operations against the extremists on the state's borders with Bihar and Madhya Pradesh would continue. He added that a magisterial inquiry had been ordered into the incident and this would establish if any innocent person had been killed.

He also announced that ``hardened criminals and mafia dons in the state have either been eliminated in armed encounters with the police during the past four months of my tenure or booked under the National Security Act and the Gangsters' Act.''