Hurried autopsy adds to lapse list

Bhopal: The Madhya Pradesh government seems to have added a slapdash autopsy to the list of puzzling lapses and unanswered questions swirling around the "encounter" killings of eight Simi operatives hours after an alleged jailbreak in Bhopal on Monday. Police sources said a single doctor had conducted post-mortem examinations on all the eight between 5pm and 9pm on Monday itself, without any video-recording or the presence of multiple forensic experts as is the norm. Such a lapse could have been prompted by a hurry to hand the bodies over to the families for burial in an attempt to stem the controversy, the sources said. However, it means the state police would find it that much harder to establish a genuine encounter if challenged in court, legal experts said. Especially since the Supreme Court has repeatedly condemned fake encounters, calling them "cold-blooded, brutal murder by persons who are supposed to uphold the law". Dr Ashok Sharma, head of the medico-legal department at Gandhi Medical College, performed the autopsies at Bhopal's Hamidia Hospital with the help of an assistant, sources close to him said. Doctors said that each body takes at least an hour during an autopsy, which involves incising the body, studying multiple injuries and bullet trajectories (if any) as well as the various organs, and then stitching it up. Dr Sharma was unwilling to comment, the sources claiming that senior police officers had asked him not to. Lawyer Parvez Alam, who represented the eight suspects and said he had seen the post-mortem reports, said the autopsy revealed death from gunshot wounds mostly in the abdomen and the chest. This newspaper's Tuesday edition had quoted an officer as saying that criminals usually run helter-skelter during encounters, getting hit in various parts of the body, especially the back and the legs. Alam said the short autopsy reports said nothing about abrasions and contusions that the suspects would have suffered while scaling the 32ft-high jail walls with makeshift ladders knotted with bed sheets, as the police say they did. Alam had yesterday claimed the police had taken his clients out of jail and shot them dead. The state government, though, has given a clean chit to the police in a preliminary report to the Union home ministry that fails to throw light on the many mysteries around the incident: Selective escape The eight escaped terror suspects came from three different jail barracks that they shared with several more Simi operatives, sources said, though the prison authorities haven't confirmed this. It's unclear why their fellow Simi cadres - the jail housed 29 in all from the banned organisation - didn't escape too. 'Key' puzzle Sources said no locks were broken or bars bent, suggesting the escaped prisoners used keys or duplicates for the multiple sets of locks they would have had to open. According to the jail manual, the keys of cells, barracks and blocks are kept in the administrative block, which is some distance away. The inmates would have had access only to metal utensils and pieces of wood if they wanted to make duplicates. It's not clear why, if the suspects were so highly skilled at picking locks, they did not bother to free their leader, Abu Faisal aka "Doctor", who was in a nearby cell. Armed or not? Sanjeev Shami, the anti-terrorist squad chief who was among the first police officers to confront the escaped prisoners, is insistent that the eight were unarmed while justifying the killing of the "dreaded criminals". Chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and Bhopal inspector-general of police Yogesh Choudhary have contradicted Shami while state home minister Bhupendra Singh has changed his statement after saying the eight carried no guns. Choudhary says the Simi operatives had four country-made guns and some sharp-edged weapons, and fired two rounds at the police. He says they injured three policemen with "sharp weapons" but has not identified any of the injured cops. Shami has said no policeman was injured. Even if the suspects were armed, there's no explanation where they got the weapons - or the jeans, shoes and belts they were wearing, or the dry meat, raisins and dry fruits that sections of the local Hindi media say they were carrying. NIA probe or not? For two days, Chouhan kept saying the jailbreak would be probed by the National Investigation Agency but now his government has fallen silent on whether it would write the required letter to the Union home ministry. The Chouhan government's report to Delhi does not say anything even about referring the case to the state's criminal investigation department (CID). Two years ago, the apex court had said that every encounter death must be probed by the CID or an independent agency. Delhi-based criminal lawyer M.S. Khan cited a recent apex court order that said the security forces did not have an automatic right to shoot even if they saw someone carrying weapons in a "disturbed" area. He objected to the state government report referring to the eight suspects as "terrorists", since they have not been convicted. An audio is being circulated over the social media, purportedly carrying a senior police officer's orders - issued over the wireless during the "encounter" - to kill all the suspects. "Five have been killed," another voice is heard saying.