SHILLONG, Sep 9: Former HNLC leader Cheristerfield Thangkhiew was killed in a botched-up operation, the report of the one-man commission of inquiry, headed by Justice (retd) T Vaiphei, said.
Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma tabled the report in the Assembly on Friday. The report said the operation was a well-laid plan but executed “poorly, recklessly, hastily and without proper application of mind”.
“…it was a botched-up operation, failing in its objective of apprehending the deceased alive, who would have given valuable information to the police about the subversive activities of the proscribed HNLC outfit,” the report said.
According to the report, the operation to arrest Thangkhiew from his residence on August 13 last year was carried out by the Tactical Team-I in a reckless manner and was a “culpable of thoughtless and excessive use of force’, which resulted in his death.
The report said the culpability of the Tactical Team-I in the manner in which it carried out the operation is now best left to the jurisdictional criminal court to decide.
Stating that Thangkhiew was never apprehended alive, the report said it was thus a futile exercise. Had they waited for about 2 hours or so to let the daylight to emerge, cordoned off the house of the deceased (as they actually did it here) and lobbed teargas grenade into the rooms occupied by the deceased and his family, they could have been forced to come out of the house and the deceased could have been easily apprehended by this means, the report said.
In the aftermath of the operation, the commission had recommended several measures to prevent recurrence of such incidents. It suggested that raiding a residential house at night should be avoided so that the innocent occupants are not harmed.
Further, it recommended that the police use night vision devices and tear gas grenades while raiding residential houses, sensitise the police on human rights and make it mandatory that an ambulance is part of the police team during such raids in urban areas.
The report said the evidence of the state witness no 4 (unnamed) is that in that meeting (the tactical meeting held prior to the operation), there was no talks regarding intelligence information as to who were present with the deceased at his house on that night.
According to the witness, when the cops reached the gate of Thangkhiew’s residence, they called out to him two-three times to make their presence felt, but there was no response from inside.
It was drizzling at the time and on reaching the main door of the first floor, the cops knocked at the door three times. When there was no response, they forced open the door.
The state witness No 4 said after they had forcibly opened the door, he was the first to enter the approximately 3 feet wide narrow corridor.
The corridor was completely dark and he proceeded further to reach almost the end of it when, suddenly, in the cover of darkness, one person came charging at him by making a loud noise.
It had appeared to the witness in the darkness that the aggressor was raising his hand and was about to attack him (witness) and he shouted “Sangeh, Sangeh!” (Stop, stop!).
“When the aggressor did not stop and continued to charge aggressively (at that time, the distance between him and the aggressor was barely two-three feet), he, fearing an imminent attack, was left with no option but, in a split second decision, fired only one round from his service weapon at the lower portion of the aggressor. That person sustained a bullet injury and collapsed. The other members of the tactical team were behind him,” the report said.
“Thereafter, followed by other senior officers, (he) entered the room where the deceased was shot. When the light was turned on, the injured was seen lying on the floor and was identified as the deceased… A knife was also found. In his examination by counsel for the commission, the witness denied that he had used excessive force by firing at the deceased,” the report said.
It further said having entered what could potentially be a lion’s den in darkness without proper planning and without taking adequate precaution, the state witness no 4 had taken purely avoidable and unnecessary risk endangering his own life and that of the deceased whom the team professed to have not intended to kill.
The report said several pieces of information came to light during the police investigation after the IED blasts. It said the architect of the explosions was one Sanbor Pala who used to offer money to the accused persons for successfully making IEDs and exploding them at his instructions.
“In the course of investigation of extortion FIRs, evidence was unearthed in early August 2021 that the deceased was suspected to be operating under an alias (Sanbor Pala) and was extorting money to fund militant activities of the HNLC in the form of IED explosions,” the report said.
The breakthrough in the extortion cases came when one of the complainants had approached the police confidentially on August 2 last year with similar allegations regarding demand notes received by him from the HNLC.
The investigation team was given an audio recording of the extortionist and upon analysing the voice of the extortionist and comparing it against the control sample derived from publicly-available audio recordings and video address of the deceased, it gave rise to suspicion of the investigating officer that the caller and the deceased were the same person.
“The audio sample was seized and sent for forensic examination and police came to draw the inference that the audio of Sanbor Pala recorded prima facie matched that of Thangkhiew.