Intro : In a major crackdown in Andhra on alleged smugglers and woodcutters, the Andhra Pradesh Police on the April 7 shot dead 20 of them, all natives of Tamil Nadu, in an ‘encounter’ deep inside the Seshachalam Reserve Forest in Andhra.
Television viewers across the state of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh were jolted to see horrendous pictures on their television Screen akin to a Nigerian shoot out by suspected Islamic extremists who attacked an agricultural college in the dead of night, gunning down dozens of students as they slept in dormitories in Nigeria's ongoing Islamic uprising. But in Andhra and Telangana it was no different.
In a major crackdown in Andhra on alleged red sanders smugglers and woodcutters, the Andhra Pradesh Police on the April 7 shot dead 20 of them, all natives of Tamil Nadu, in an ‘encounter’ deep inside the Seshachalam Reserve Forest in Andhra. A team of police personnel belonging to Andhra Pradesh’s Red Sanders Anti-Smuggling Task Force, who came ‘face to face’ with the smugglers and woodcutters during their combing operations, gunned them down in ‘self defence’. The AP teams involved in the operation found hundreds of smugglers trying to fell trees, the police asked them to surrender, they started pelting stones causing injuries to policemen.“They had no option but to protect themselves by opening fire. Attacks on AP Road transport buses going to Tamil Nadu as all the alleged labourers contracted to do wood cutting hailed from Tamil Nadu.
Viqaruddin Ahmed, self-styled commander of Tehreek-Galba-e-Islam, used to regularly pick up arguments and fights with cops and the jail staff.They in fact got into a nasty fight with the prison staff at the Chanchalguda jail in Hyderabad demanding mobile phones and food. After that episode, the duo was shifted to the Warangal jail in February 2011. The jail authorities then separated the two and put them in different cells. According to police, the five undertrials — allegedly involved in a series of offences in Hyderabad, Gujarat and other states including the murder of three policemen in Hyderabad and one in Ahmedabad nonetheless, would hurl abuses at the jail staff without provocation so much so that even the staff used to think twice before getting anywhere near their barracks.
In Telangana state, as if Police are emulating their Andhra counterparts, an encounter scene duly replayed straight out of Bollywood potboiler greeted viewers. Shattered window glasses, blood stains all over, and a lifeless dreaded terrorists with a rifle in his hands and handcuffs dangling on right wrist and bodies lying on the seats in various positions. Five terror operatives were shot dead on a busy Hyderabad-Warangal Highway.
No one including the police has an unqualified right to take the life of another person. If a police officer kills someone in an encounter, he/she must prove that the death was caused either in the legitimate exercise of the right of private defence or in the use of force, proportional to the resistance offered. This can only be ascertained by a proper investigation and not otherwise. Having stated this social media is a buzz with complimenting the Telangana Police and many do not mind police take the law in their own hands and become executioners, particularly with regard to the dreaded criminals like Vicar and his dreaded gang.
—N Nagaraj Rao from Hyderabad
