HYDERABAD: The delay in the proceedings of the judicial commission was a blessing to several individuals connected to the crime and the alleged encounter as, on several occasions during their depositions before the commission, they said that they can not remember or recollect the events that occurred during the alleged encounter, as a long time had passed since the incident.
The commission was constituted by the Apex Court in December 2019 and was supposed to submit its report within six months. But due to the pandemic, the proceedings were delayed and started only in August. Responding to the individuals’ claims of forgetting details, the commission wryly noted, “These brilliant officers are able to remember many minute aspects about the incident, but have strangely forgotten some important aspects.”
During the course of the proceedings, the police alleged that they were threatened by the NHRC members while their statements were being recorded, but none of them complained against them. The police personnel also disowned their statements recorded by the IO in the ‘encounter’ case, stating that they were not written in their presence. In addition to this, they also disowned their own affidavits recorded by their counsels in their presence, saying the advocates had not drafted the affidavits properly.
Moreover, the IOs in both cases and even the NHRC officials blamed ‘media and crowd’ for not being able to carry out various procedures. Several ‘interesting facts,’ which never appeared in their statements before the NHRC, IOs and in their affidavits, came up during their deposition. Many questions pertaining to the arrests remained unanswered.
The commission also expressed shock at the manner in which the accused were granted police custody without the magistrate seeing them and expressed anger at police officials for not being able to understand English. “Officers who are of graduate and above qualification, working in the department for a long time, claiming that they do not understand English, is unthinkable,” the commission had observed.