11 years on, memories of encounter haunt Warangal

Warangal: In what can be termed as a rerun of Warangal encounter in which three youth, who were allegedly involved in acid attack against two college girls, were gunned down exactly a week shorter than 11-year-ago, the Cyberabad police on Friday eliminated four accused who allegedly raped and murdered Disha.

The man of the moment is certainly V C Sajjanar, Cyberabad Police Commissioner. Not to mention, he was the Warangal Superintendent of Police in 2008 when the acid attack accused were gunned down.

In a revisit to the fateful morning of December 10 incident that sent shockwaves across the nation, three youth identified as S Srinivas Rao (25) main accused, and his accomplice P Harikrishna (24), and B Sanjay (22) attacked K Swapnika and T Praneetha, both final year B Tech students of Kakatiya Institute of Technology and Science (KITS) with acid. While Swapnika, who sustained 50 per cent burns in the attack breathed her last after three weeks, Praneetha is still to get over the shock.

The gruesome incident invariably drew the same sort of public outburst and media glare then, à la the case of Disha. 'Instant justice' was the call from a wide spectrum of people then and now.

Akin to the Friday's encounter killing, the Warangal Police, along with the accused, went to a location close to Mamnoor Airport in the wee hours of December 13 to reconstruct the offence and collect the evidences.

What ensued at that time was not far from imagination, understandably the police opened fire against the trio in self-defence killing them on the spot. Thereafter, barring a few sporadic occurrences, Warangal city has not witnessed any such alarming incident until a spurned lover Pendyala Sai Anvesh set ablaze his childhood friend T Ravali in Hanamkonda on February 27 this year.

Incidentally, on the fateful day of Disha's murder, a teenage girl of Hanamkonda was also molested and killed by her friend Puli Sai Goud. Barring a sporadic outcry from the civil rights activists for killing the trio without trial, the encounter catapulted the image of the then Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy and Sajjanar to new heights.

It was no overstatement to say that even the antagonists of YSR hailed him after the incident. It was no exaggeration to say that the encounter of the trio left the city in jubilation, as it was on Friday after the news flashed that Disha killers too have met with the same fate.