November 7, 2002	Thursday	Ramazan 1,1423

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NEW DELHI, Nov 6: India’s state-run National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) ordered the Delhi police on Wednesday to give details of the shootout in a shopping complex, after newsmen demanded a probe into the deaths of the two men killed there as alleged terrorists.

The murmurs of suspicion among journalists and common people about the two men being killed in a fake encounter was given just a more credible face when a newspaper carried the story on Wednesday of a doctor who said he had witnessed the murder of ‘the unarmed men’.

Indian officials had promptly implicated Islamabad in the incident, saying that the two men were from Pakistan’s Punjab region, including one from Kasur.

But the commission has asked the police to file a reply within a week on what exactly happened on Sunday evening at the popular Ansal Plaza shopping complex which was crowded with the Diwali revellers when the incident happened.

The notice follows a complaint filed before the NHRC by two journalists, Kuldeep Nayar and Praful Bidwai, warning that the encounter could be fake.

Police had claimed that the two men belonged to the Lashkar-i-Taiba group and that they wanted to kill shoppers during the Hindu festival of Diwali, that was celebrated on Monday, to stir up communal trouble.

There have been official claims also that the two planned to kill Deputy Home Minister Lal Krishan Advani.

There have been similar allegations about the threat to Advani and in one or two occasions the suspects were killed in similar encounters.

But what Dr D. H. Krishna, a Delhi-based medical practitioner, told The Asian Age could change the story completely, at least as far as the Delhi killings are concerned.

“The men were unarmed and were shot dead by the police”, Dr Krishna said, claiming there was no shootout between the two sides.

The doctor said he was in the basement of the shopping complex along with his wife and son at the time of the incident.

Speaking to the paper, Dr Krishna dismissed the reports appearing in media that the terrorists were killed after an encounter with the Special Cell of the Delhi police.

He said that while he was in the basement, he saw two men in their early 20s,”barely able to walk,” come out of a car. “Being a doctor, I could easily make out that either they had not slept for several days or had taken a heavy dose of sleeping pills,” said the doctor.

He said that at the time of the incident there were about seven to eight other people in the basement.

“The two boys were shot dead in front of us,” Dr Krishna claimed and said the police version that “the terrorists opened fire on the police party” was false. “They were empty-handed when they stepped out from the car”, he said.

“Had there been a real encounter the other people in the basement would have been injured”, the self-proclaimed witness said.