New Delhi: The families of victims of encounter killings in UP have filed a petition with the National Human Rights Commission for immediate inquiry in the killings, which the families feel were planned 'Cold blooded murders' raising doubts over the police version of events.
The families were brought together in Delhi by a group called ' Citizens against Hate' which prepared a documented report of 16 incidents of alleged encounter killings in UP and 12 cases in Mewat region that took place in 2017- 2018.
Senior Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan dubbed the police encounter killings in UP as "murders" and demanded a probe into all such cases by independent teams of National Human Rights Commission(NHRC).
"These are extra judicial killlings. How can you expect fair investigation in the killings when a nearby police statio is doing the investigation in the case. This is why NHRC should step in and investigate." Bhushan said.
The report said that in all cases, FIRs have been filed against the very victims, instead of the erring police officers as mandated by the supreme court. FIR accessed by the team showed an identical template of sequence of events leading to the encounter - raising questions on the credibility. In every case, one person is killed while another person always manages to escape. This is remarkable considering the victim and alleged "criminals" are surrounded and trapped in a planned encounter, with the police far out numbering the criminals, the report stated.
Almost all the victims of these killings belonged to vulnerable social groups - muslims, dalits and bahujans, and come from low-economic households, states the report.
"My brother Mansoor, 31, was picked up by policemen from home in Pathan Pura, Behat in Saharanpur, and later we got the news that he was involved in a robbery and was killed in an encounter in Meerut on December 6, 2017. He was mentaly unstable for 2.5 years after he was tortured by police earlier. Why was he picked up when he could barely know what was right and what was wrong, had he been picked up earlier we had no regrets." said Waseem Khan, Mansoor's cousin.