Hyderabad: While police experts say that fake encounters should be seen as the result of a non-functional criminal judicial system, human rights activists say that vested interests of the state are being served by the brutal killings.
Law experts, meanwhile, point out that the police department, the most important enforcement body, should not lose faith in the judiciary and must not take justice into its hands.
In the eyes of the law, an encounter is a murder, which has to be investigated and tried in court, and if a police officer is found guilty, he has to be punished. However, so far, not a single police officer has been convicted or punished by the judiciary in Andhra Pradesh.
The main reason for fake encounters in the state is that there is no system in place to punish the guilty police officers. “In all the encounters, the cops could manage to close the investigations before they reached the trial stage. The magisterial inquiries in all the previous police firings and encounters were just for the sake of formality, and every inquiry report ended up favouring the cops,” said Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee member and advocate Suresh Kumar. “Police is considered to be a mere tool in the hands of the establishment. So if the establishment does not like anybody, it will use the police to eliminate them,” said High Court advocate Shafeeq-ur-Rahman Muhajir.
