A four-member team from the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) on Saturday questioned the doctors who conducted the autopsy on the bodies of the four men, who were killed in an alleged encounter with the police at Telangana’s Shadnagar on Friday morning.

The four men, all in their early twenties, were accused in the rape and murder of a 26-year-old veterinarian at Shamshabad on the outskirts of Hyderabad on the intervening night of November 27 and 28.

The accused were arrested a day later and remanded to judicial custody on November 30. The police, who took them into custody for questioning on Wednesday, shot them dead in the early hours of Friday in an alleged encounter.

The NHRC team, accompanied by three forensic experts, landed and drove straightaway to the government hospital in Mahabubnagar, where the bodies of the four accused were preserved in the mortuary after the post-mortem, following the last minute directions from the Telangana high court on Friday night.

“After examining the bodies for a while in the mortuary, they obtained the autopsy reports prepared by the doctors and studied them extensively with the help of the forensic experts accompanying them,” a staff member in the hospital, familiar with the development said.

The team members raised some doubts over certain observations made in the report. They called the doctors from Gandhi Hospital in Secunderabad who conducted the autopsy. “And they questioned the doctors for a long time over the way they had conducted the autopsy and got their doubts clarified,” the hospital staff member said.

Later, the NHRC team went to the mortuary again and made a detailed inspection of the bodies to locate the bullet injuries on the bodies and enquired about other details of the accused from the doctors.

“They also had an interaction with the relatives of the three accused, Mohd Arif, Jollu Shiva and Jollu Naveen and recorded their statements, before leaving for Hyderabad. The family members of Ch Chenna Kesavulu from Gudigandla village did not come to Mahabubnagar to speak to the NHRC members,” the staff member said.

The NHRC team later visited the encounter site at Chatanpalli near Shadnagar on their way back to Hyderabad. Though it was getting dark by then, the team members chose to examine the place and made enquiries with the Cyberabad police on how the encounter had taken place. They are expected to meet top police officials of Cyberabad and other state police departments on Sunday.

Meanwhile, the Mahabubnagar police filed a petition in the Telangana high court requesting that the bodies of the four accused be shifted to Hyderabad in the wake of law and order issues and also due to lack of proper facilities at the Mahabubnagar hospital mortuary to preserve the bodies for a long time.

The Telangana high court directed that the bodies be preserved till 8 pm on Monday, till it heard a petition in the morning on the same day. Only after getting further directions from the high court, the bodies would be handed over to the families.

Meanwhile, the police have registered a case on the encounter. Assistant Commissioner of Police Surender Rao, who is the investigating officer of the rape and murder case lodged a complaint based on which the case was registered.

Source:hindustantimes.com/