HYDERABAD: In order to know whether the alleged police encounter of Punnam Lingaiah alias Linganna, at Rallagadda village in Gundala Mandal of Bhadradri-Kothagudem district on Wednesday was fake or not, a division bench of the Telangana High Court on Thursday ordered that a re-postmortem be done at Gandhi Hospital here by 6 pm on Friday.
The court directed the hospital’s superintendent to form a three-member team comprising senior medical jurists for the purpose and submit a detailed post-mortem report by August 5. The bench, comprising Chief Justice Raghvendra Singh Chauhan and Justice Shameem Akther, passed this order on a PIL filed in the form of a lunch motion by Prof Gaddam Laxman, president of State Civil Liberties Committee, seeking a direction to the Telangana government to form a special investigation team (SIT) and probe the alleged encounter.
The petitioner’s counsel, V Raghunath, told the court that Linganna was killed in a fake police encounter and the authorities concerned didn’t register a case under Section 302 (punishment for murder) and other relevant sections of the IPC against the person responsible. As Linganna was subjected to a post-mortem at a local hospital, he urged the court to direct the State government to preserve the body and conduct a re-post-mortem by a medical board of expert doctors from Gandhi Hospital.
‘Was opposed to State’
Additional advocate general J Ramachandra Rao argued in the HC that Linganna was working against the interest of the State, and the encounter actually took place in Chhattisgarh