GUWAHATI
A rights group has asked the Centre to sanction the prosecution of the Army personnel found to be involved in the killing of civilians in Nagaland’s Mon district in 2021 and make the findings of a special investigation team (SIT) public.
Soldiers of an elite unit of the Army had on December 4, 2021, gunned down 13 civilians near Oting village in a botched ambush. Another person was killed in Mon, the district headquarters, on December 5 when the Assam Rifles personnel fired at an angry mob that protested the Oting killings.
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) said the SIT set up by the Nagaland government had completed its investigation into the massacre in March, submitted its chargesheet in mid-April and its final report in May before a local court in Mon. The SIT had named 30 Army personnel in its chargesheet.
“Since April, the SIT has been awaiting sanction from the Department of Military Affairs to proceed with prosecution. More importantly, the Nagaland Chief Minister said in early March that the SIT findings would be made public only after the Centre would give permission to prosecute,” PUDR secretaries Deepika Tandon and Shahana Bhattacharya said in a statement on Friday.
The Army had also conducted an independent probe into the Oting incident. But it is not mandated to make its findings public. Demanding that the Centre sanction the prosecution of the guilty Army personnel, the PUDR said the SIT had accused the Army on multiple grounds in its 300-page report.
“…the most recent reportage on the findings is damning because they show that the commanding officer was aware for full 50 minutes and that he had suppressed the information that the team’s ambush was laid on the wrong track. Further, the post-mortem report shows that the killings of all 14 villagers, carried out over two consecutive operations, were deliberate in design,” the PUDR said.
The sanction from the Centre is mandatory for initiating legal suit against Army personnel, the PUDR said. It cited a Rajya Sabha report that said 30 requests made to the Centre for prosecution from 1991 to 2015 were turned down while eight have remained pending.
“In short, such routine denials along with the refusal to share the findings of inquiries thwart the possibility of prosecuting the guilty and allows the Army to sit judge and jury over its own actions,” the PUDR said.
