Monday, October 12, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
POLITICS-INDIA: Activists Say Pakistanis Killed in Fake Encounter
Ranjit Devraj
- India’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has ordered protection for an eyewitness who claimed that a shootout, in which police killed two supposed Pakistani militants in a busy shopping mall here Sunday, had been stage-managed.
Following a petition by Kuldip Nayyar and Praful Bidwai, journalists and human rights activists, the commission Wednesday ordered ”immediate and adequate protection to Dr H Krishna and his family”.
It also directed the Delhi’s commissioner of police to interact with its own investigative officers on the issue.
Krishna apparently came under threat after he told newspersons that the two men, identified by police as Pakistani nationals, were barely able to walk and were in fact dragged out of their car and then shot in cold blood.
”Being a doctor I could easily make out that either they had not slept for several days or had been taking a heavy dose of sleeping pills”. They were empty handed when they stepped out from the car,” Krishna was quoted by the ‘Asian Age’ newspaper as saying.
Other newspapers said Krishna was prevented by police from talking to television crews that converged on the Ansal Plaza shopping mall soon after the shooting. Krishna and his family are missing from their home in the posh Greater Kailash area of the city.
In their petition to the NHRC, Nayyar and Bidwai said: ”We are very concerned about the report, which appears credible, about the account given by an eyewitness to the so-called Ansal shootout.”
Enclosing in their petition news clippings from the ‘Asian Age’ and ‘Midday’ (newspaper), they cited reports that ”the witness is under some intimidation from the police”.
”In short the entire episode has all the trappings of a staged encounter, which is eminently the domain of this Honorable Commission,” the two petitioners argued.
They requested the NHRC, a statutory body, to institute a full inquiry into the matter, direct protection to the eyewitness Krishna and a recording of his version of Sunday’s events. ”The dangers of the police and the Home Department so completely exceeding themselves as to actually create unnecessary terror and consider the extinguishing of human life a simple matter for their own ends can hardly be overstressed,” the petitioners said.
On Tuesday, Police Commissioner R S Gupta said at a press conference that the two dead men had been identified as Pakistani nationals Daoud Ali Ahmed and Izaz Ahmed belonging to Lashkar-e-Taiba (Soliders of God), a banned Pakistan-based militant group.
According to Gupta, the two men belonged to Pakistan’s Punjab province and had the backing of Pakistan’s shadowy Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) in disrupting ‘Diwali’, India’s festival of lights on Monday, through acts of terror.
Police said the men carried diaries with Pakistani telephone numbers, an AK rifle with two magazines and two Chinese-make pistols when confronted in the parking basement of the Ansal Plaza.
The police said they were acting on a tip-off that two were planning a major strike in the national capital and were waiting for them at the Ansal Plaza complex.
Police also said the Home Ministry has sent a letter to the External Affairs Ministry, asking it to apprise the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi that the two militants were Pakistanis and asking it to claim the bodies.
On Monday, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee accused Pakistan of continuing with a policy of arming sending militants across the border into India and ruled out talks with the neighbouring country in the near future. ”Till terrorist activities continue, dialogue (with Pakistan) will have no meaning,” he said.
India has been under pressure from several major western powers to defuse tensions with its neighbour and this month ordered the withdrawal of some 700,000 troops from the common border of the nuclear-armed neighbours.
That deployment was ordered after a four-man militant squad carried out an attack on India’s Parliament in December last year, resulting in a shootout in which seven security guards were killed.
Pakistan denied involvement in the attack, but India argued that it had positively identified the four-man squad of ‘fedayeen’ (members of suicide mission) as Pakistani nationals and members of the banned militant group Lashkar-Toiba (Soldiers of God).
Tensions between India and Pakistan remained high after that, necessitating intense intervention by high-level foreign diplomats led by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to prevent them from going to war.
Hopes were high that elections in Indian-administered Kashmir, which saw a 45 percent voter turnout, and the pullout of Indian troops from the border would make for a more conducive environment for India and Pakistan to resume dialogue cut off in the last three years.
In July, Powell said that credible elections in Kashmir would be a step towards peace and the resumption of diplomatic dialogue between the South Asian neighbours, which broke down in 1999 after they engaged in hostilities short of a declared war on the Line of Control at Kargil.
Earlier this month, India’s Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani said that he saw little chance of Pakistan changing its polices and that he expected the ”proxy war” that Pakistan pursues by arming militant groups in Kashmir to continue for some time.
Print
|
POLITICS-INDIA: Activists Say Pakistanis Killed in Fake Encounter
Ranjit Devraj
- India’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has ordered protection for an eyewitness who claimed that a shootout, in which police killed two supposed Pakistani militants in a busy shopping mall here Sunday, had been stage-managed.
(more…)
Print
|
