Nagpur: Gadchiroli district police on Wednesday disposed of 20 unidentified bodies of the alleged cadres of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) who were gunned down in two encounters in the forests adjoining Kasnasur-Boriya-Rela villages and another near Nainer hamlets in southern part of the district. Six more bodies, including two yet to be identified, are kept at the mortuary of Gadchiroli district government hospital.
The bodies, under the direction of sub-divisional magistrate (SDM), were taken to the banks of Katani river where they were buried after completing formalities. The exercise was conducted under tight security. Police said 14 bodies have already been handed over to the relatives of the deceased including that of senior divisional committee members (DVCM), Shrinu and Sainath, who were killed along with 34 others near Rela-Kasnasur-Boriya village on the banks of Indravati river.
SP, Gadchiroli, Abhinav Deshmukh, said four bodies in the mortuary have been identified but no one has come forward to claim them. “We have already sent the viscera samples of the 17 bodies recovered from the site near Kasnasur-Boriya to thwart claims of poisoning. The process of completing the formalities of DNA profiling is still to be done,” he said.
Deshmukh also said the post-mortem reports of around 30 cadres are still awaited even as Gadchiroli district hospital authorities have been asked to expedite the process of sending the documents to the police department as soon as possible. The SP had earlier claimed that post-mortem reports of around 10, out of 16 bodies recovered on the first day from Rela-Kasnasur-Boriya forests, showed that the slain Maoists had died of bullet injuries. “Three bodies of identified Maoists from Chhattisgarh are among the half dozen still kept at the mortuary,” the SP said. He also indicated that there may be bodies, especially the ones recovered from the river, whose cause of death would be drowning as the forensic teams could not spot bullet injuries.
With the passage of time, chances of tracing seven persons missing from Gattepalli village from where the slain DVCM Sainath belonged to have become further dim now. Three more persons are learnt to be missing from Boriya village since April 21 when the encounter had taken place close to their hamlet. Police had recovered 34 bodies of the alleged Maoist cadres killed in this encounter. Unconfirmed sources claimed that there had been a body of a boy, aged about 16, among the dead.
Gadchiroli collector Shekhar Singh had already ordered probe into both the encounters of April 21 (Rela-Boriya-Kasnasur forest where 34 bodies have been found) and April 22 (Nainer where six got killed) to be conducted by sub-divisional magistrates of Aheri and Etapalli.
