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SC orders CBI probe into Manipur killings

By Spl Correspondent

NEW DELHI, July 14 - In a landmark judgement, the Supreme Court today directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to constitute a team to probe into the Manipur encounter killings.

The order is specific to those cases in which judicial inquiries were ordered by Gauhati and Manipur high courts.

The judgement passed by Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice Deepak Gupta was in response to a petition filed by the Extra Judicial Execution Victims Families Association, a registered trust having as its members the wives and mothers of persons whom they claim have been extra-judicially executed by the Manipur Police and the security forces, mainly the Assam Rifles and the Army. The petitioner has alleged 1,528 extra-judicial killings by the Army and other security forces in Manipur.

The bench also directed the agency to submit a status report on the same by January next year.

The petitioner also mentioned that members of the armed forces had escaped punishment because they operated under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958 (AFSPA) that grants special powers to arrest, conduct searches and seizures and also provides immunity from prosecution.

In 2013, a committee appointed by the Supreme Court to probe six cases of alleged extra-judicial killings in Manipur informed the court that all the encounters were fake.

The committee, comprising retired judge Justice Santosh Hegde, former chief election commissioner JM Lyngdoh and former Karnataka police chief AK Singh, held that all the seven victims, including a 12-year-old boy, did not have any criminal background and had not been named in any insurgency-related case.

On April 20, the Army had told the apex court that it cannot be subjected to FIRs for carrying out anti-militancy operations in insurgency-prone areas like Jammu and Kashmir and Manipur, while alleging local bias in judicial inquiries conducted against it in these regions, which have tarnished its image.

�In every military operation, the Army cannot be disbelieved. Every judicial inquiry cannot be against the Army. The alleged extra-judicial killing cases in Manipur are not cases of massacre, rather these are cases of military operations,� the Centre had told the court.

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