SHILLONG: A new book that was released in the city on Thursday investigates the murder of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati in Kandhamal, Odisha, in 2008 and gives an account of the subsequent violence unleashed on local Christians.
‘Who Killed Swami Laxmanananda’ by senior journalist Anto Akkara was released by another veteran from the fraternity, Billy P Domes, at the Shillong Press Club.
Giving a summary of his book, Akkara said it contains facts about seven innocent Christians who are still languishing in jail following the mysterious murder of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati on August 23, 2008.
These seven accused, 6 of whom are illiterates, were convicted for the murder touted as a Christian conspiracy.
Following the murder, nearly 100 Christians were killed and 300 churches and 6,000 Christian houses plundered during an orchestrated violence that continued for weeks.
With the investigative book released in May 2016, the author exposed the Sangh Parivar fraud behind Kandhamal that has led to seven innocent Christians being fraudulently convicted to life imprisonment by the subversion of the justice delivery system.
Akkara, who has been a journalist with the international media for over a quarter century, stirred the national conscience with his investigative book ‘Kandhamal – a blot on Indian Secularism’ within seven months of the communal conflagration.
For his “stellar work” on Kandhamal, the author was conferred in 2013 the prestigious Titus Brandsma Award for Journalism, instituted in memory of a Dutch journalist who was incarcerated by the Nazis for writing an editorial against Hitler.
Brandsma died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1942.
To take the findings on the Kandhamal fraud to a logical conclusion, the author has been anchoring an online signature campaign for the release of the seven innocents with www.release7innocents.com.
