Indian communists demand probe into Maoist killing

India’s communists and a human rights group condemned Saturday the killing of a top Maoist rebel and suggested that the shoot out in which he was killed was staged by security forces. Indian police has been in the spotlight over “fake encounters” or staged killings in the recent past. In 2009, New York-based Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 80 police officers and said nearly all believed illegal detention, torture and even killing were legitimate tools for law enforcement.
Police said Maoist military commander Koteshwar Rao, also known as Kishnenji, died Thursday in a gunbattle in a forest in the eastern state of West Bengal, striking a major blow to extreme left-wing fighters who control impoverished but mineral-rich swathes of the country. “The story of the encounter appears to be fake,” Gurudas Dasgupta of the Communist Party of India said, asking for a government probe into whether the rebel leader had been killed in “cold blood”.
The government released photographs of the slain 58-year-old rebel commander lying in a pool of blood next to a machine-gun while bullet marks on trees and nearly 100 spent cartridges marked the scene of the shootout.