NEW DELHI, Nov 7: Police here bowed to pressure on Thursday and agreed to offer to India’s national human rights panel a blow-by-blow account of a purported gunbattle at a mall that left two Muslims dead.

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) had called on the Delhi police to give its version of the weekend shootout at the upmarket Ansal Plaza shopping arcade following complaints that the two men were murdered in cold blood.

Police Commissioner R.S. Gupta, in a letter to NHRC’s chief investigator, Y. N. Srivastava, agreed to furnish within a week a full account of the shootout that occurred on Sunday at the packed shopping mall.

“We have assured the commission that the full details of the encounter will be submitted to the commission within a week,” he said.

Gupta also assured NHRC that security was being provided to a civilian —- who claimed to be the only witness to the shootout —- in line with appeals from the rights body.

Witness Hari Krishna, in a complaint to the NHRC, had said the two men, aged between 20 and 25 years, were unarmed when they were mowed down by the police.

But the police said Krishna was missing from his home along with his family.

“We went to his house to offer security but we don’t know where he has vanished,” said Deputy Police Commissioner P. Upadhaya.

The commission walked into the row on Wednesday when member of parliament Kuldip Nayyar and a journalist lodged a complaint to the rights body, raising doubts over the police version of events.

The police, however, found an ally in India’s ruling Hindu nationalist BJP party, which without naming Nayyar said rights groups should not launch a smear campaign against law enforcers without verifying facts.

“When important people lend their names to discredit security agencies, particularly when security agencies have succeeded in saving innocent citizens from terrorists, they must be sure of their facts,” BJP spokesman Arun Jaitley said.

“If this discrediting of the security agencies is done by some so-called human rights activists without any basis, in that event these activists are bringing a bad name to human rights,” Jaitley, a former law minister, said.

Police claim they had been tipped off to militants from the Lashkar-i-Taiba, who planned to attack a target in Delhi on the eve of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.

Acting on information, they claim they set a trap for the two attackers in the basement of Ansal Plaza, where they said the militants planned to open fire randomly at shoppers.—AFP