'Finish Them All': New Audio, Allegedly Of Bhopal Cops, On SIMI Encounter

New Delhi: "Finish them all" - Niptado sab - says a voice after the person on the other end of a crackling walkie-talkie says "paanch toh mar gaye" (five have died).

Some math is exchanged: three men remain alive. They need to be shot.

A few seconds later comes the update that all eight men have been killed ("aanthon maare gaye"). Applause breaks out. "Sir, badhai ho, aathon maare gaye. (Congratulations, sir, all eight are dead). "Very good, very good," they are told, "we are reaching there."

After a series of indicting videos that showed eight men without arms being shot at close range by the police on the outskirts of Bhopal, audio tapes of the conversations between the cops who were on the ground and their bosses in the control room have been leaked today. The walkie-talkie recordings appear to corroborate what the footage proposed - that the men who were killed, members of the banned SIMI group who had escaped from prison a few hours ago, did not open fire on the police when confronted. (NDTV cannot verify the authenticity of the audio or video recordings)

Contradicting other police officers and ministers, Sanjeev Shami, the head of Madhya Pradesh's anti-terror squad, which led the encounter with the prisoners, has said the escapees were not armed when they were gunned down. But their killing was necessary, he told NDTV, because of the danger they posed, and "the police has the right to use excessive force in some situations."

The country's top human rights organisation has sought an explanation from the government of Madhya Pradesh on the killings that took place early on Monday morning. The eight men who were from the Students Islamic Movement of India or SIMI took advantage of Diwali night to make their escape. They allegedly shaped toothbrushes into keys, slit the throat of a guard, then slithered up the 30-feet-high prison wall using bedsheets strung together. None of this is on camera because CCTVs were not working.

The men then escaped on foot to a village on the outskirts of Bhopal, where villagers detected them and informed the police, who arrived to find that the SIMI activists now had four guns on them which they shot six times, according to some government and police officers. Three cops were injured, not from bullets, but from sharp weapons. Each of the jail-breakers was shot at least twice, some in the back, according to the post-mortem reports.

Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has said the opposition is lending support to terrorists by questioning the credibility of the police's version of events. Some union ministers have suggested the same.

The new audio leaks will add to the urgent demand of a detailed inquiry by an agency from outside Madhya Pradesh, a proposal which the state government has so far resisted.