Rights panel seeks report on 'wrong' disposal of bodies

Vijay Upadhyay
Agra. With a number of complaints being lodged against the Agra Police for indiscriminately "flushing away" unidentified dead bodies over the past two years, the town's police force has come under the National Human Rights Commission's (NHRC) scanner, which has now served notices to the State police inquiring about the procedure followed by it for the identification of dead bodies.

In an inquiry initiated by the NHRC, taking cognizance of a story "Agra police does a quickie with dead bodies", published by The Pioneer on 13th October 2005, the Commission has asked the local police officials to file a detailed report on the number of unidentified dead bodies discovered in the town over the past one year and the efforts made by it to identify these bodies.

Notably, in the past two years, over 700 unidentified dead bodies were discovered in Agra that were cremated without identification by the police which has caused serious "misunderstandings" like the cremation of a Muslim couple as Hindus, that had brought this town on the brink of communal tension.

Talking to The Pioneer, Ratnesh Chaturvedi, Deputy Superintendent of Police (Headquarters), Agra confirmed that the police had received a notice from NHRC in November, demanding to know about the exact number of dead bodies discovered by the police in Agra district over the past one year and the methods followed by the police to get these bodies identified.

He said that acting on this notice, the Senior Superintendent of Police, Agra had sought information from all 41 police stations of the district to submit a report on the number of dead bodies discovered in their respective areas and how many of these bodies had been cremated as unidentified.

He said that besides the police stations, the Kshetra Bajaja Committee, Agra, an NGO engaged in the cremation of Hindu dead bodies in the town had also been asked to provide the data available with it on the cremation of unidentified dead bodies and, hopefully, the report shall be compiled and forwarded to the NHRC by the end of this month.

But even as the local police prepares to file an answer to the NHRC notice on this matter, it has not deterred from its usual modus operandi and according to a list made available by the Kshetra Bajaja Committee, a total of 276 dead bodies were still cremated as unidentified by the police between January & December 2005 and most of them still remain unknown as their families continue to wait for their loved ones to turn up hale and hearty.

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