By TCN News,
Hyderabad: The Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee (CLMC) has slammed the extra judicial killing of 20 laborers in 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,” a statement from the CLMC said here.
Andhra Pradesh is divided into two regions i.e. Andhra and Telangana and 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,” the statement added.
In case of these 20 persons killed, the state is saying that police killed them because they were 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 eight 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,” the CLMC alleged.
“It is very clear with this incident that there is no value of human life, but sandalwood is precious than 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 take responsibility of these murders and explain how they have drawn conclusion that they were ‘sandalwood smugglers’,” it said.
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, it added.