India: Police accused of summarily executing “terrorist suspects”

India’s Congress Party-led coalition government has rejected calls from civil rights groups and some opposition political parties for a judicial inquiry into a September 19 Delhi Police assault that resulted in the deaths of two Muslim youths.

The police have claimed that Mohammed Sajid, a 17-year-old high school student, and Mohammed Atif Amin, a 24-year-old university student, were “terrorists” and participants in the September 13 synchronized bomb attack in New Delhi that killed more than two dozen people. But the police’s claims have been vehemently denied by their friends, relatives, and neighbors. Moreover, the police’s version of what happened on the 19th has been contradicted by numerous eye witnesses, with many asserting that the gun battle in which the Muslim youths allegedly died was entirely concocted, and that the police summarily executed them.

Indian security forces have a long history of staged “terrorist encounters,” in which anti-government insurgents and in many cases ordinary civilians are murdered.

“We could not find a single person in the entire locality who could agree with the [police] story of the ‘encounter’,” reports a citizens’ fact-finding team that visited Jamia Nagar several days after the shooting. “There is a complete unanimity in the opinion of the people about the one-sided nature of the firing and the time for which it continued. ... No one told us about an exchange of fire. It was ‘only one kind of sound’.”

A number of opposition parties, including the Samajwadi Party (SP), the Trinumal Congress, and the Janata Dal (Secular) have called for a judicial inquiry into the “encounter.” Appearing at a rally in Delhi’s Jamia Nagar neighborhood last Friday, Trinumal Congress head Mamata Banerjee openly accused the police of staging a “fake encounter.”

A climate of semi-hysteria.. More