SIMI MEN WERE TAKEN OUT OF JAIL AND SHOT DEAD: LAWYER

BHOPAL: A lawyer for a group of slain Islamist radicals said on Wednesday they were taken out of jail and killed by police in a fake encounter on the outskirts of Madhya Pradesh’s capital.

Parvej Alam, who represented seven of the eight members of the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), also cited multiple bullet wounds above the waist to debunk the government’s claims that police retaliated when the militants fired on the security men.

The government says the SIMI members allegedly broke out of the high-security Bhopal central jail after killing a warder on Monday and were gunned down by security personnel on a desolate stretch on the outskirts of Bhopal.

“If CCTV footage is made available, everything will be clear and the fake encounter will be exposed… but in the absence of CCTV footage nobody knows what really happened in the barracks on that night,” Alam told Hindustan Times. Police say the jail cameras were not working the night the operatives allegedly escaped after scaling the prison walls.

Amateur video clips and contradictory statements by two senior police officials raised doubts over the encounter, with rights activists and opposition political parties demanding an independent probe.

The state’s anti-terror squad IG Sanjeev Shami told a TV channel on Wednesday that the SIMI members were not armed whereas IG Bhopal Yogesh Chaudhary had claimed that three security personnel were hit by pellets.

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