Agence france Presse
Lucknow, April5
In indiaA special court
has sentenced 47 policemen to life in prison for killing a group of Sikh
pilgrims in 1991 hom they had claimed ere militants, a prosecutor said today.
The officers were convicted of shooting dead the pilgrims to
try and earn promotions in Uttar Pradesh state which at the time was hit by
Sikh militant activity, the press Trust of India said.
The officers stopped a bus carrying the pilgrims and their
families before later marching 11 of them into a jungle area of the northern
state and carrying out the killings, prosecutor SC jaisal said.
“The court observed that there was ample evidence to award
life sentences to the guilty,” Jaiswal told AFP of the court’s decision on
Monday. “the court specifically observed that a crime of such magnitude could
not have happened without the knowledge of those higher up and they too should
have been charged”.
The court of the central bureau of investigation, india’s
leading investigative agency, found the police guilty of carrying out a “fake
encounter”.
The term is commonly used term in India for staged
confrontations in which police or military forces execute unarmed suspects and
later claim it as self-defence.
At the time of the killings, militants were fighting in the
region to ty to create a Sikh homeland called Khalistan.
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