New Delhi, April 25: Even as the Andhra Pradesh government Monday told the Supreme Court that it had handed over to the CBI the investigation into the alleged fake killing of Maoist leader Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad and freelance journalist Hem Chandra Pandey, the court said it would monitor the probe.
An apex court bench of Justice Aftab Alam and Justice R.M. Lodha directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to file its interim status report of the investigations in six weeks.
The court asked the CBI to complete the investigations within three months. It directed the investigating agency to take into account all the angles relevant to peculiar facts and circumstances of the case.
During the last hearing, the state government had told the court that it would hand over the investigation in the 2010 encounter case to the CBI.
Maoist leader Azad and Hem Chandra Pandey were killed in an alleged police encounter on the intervening night of July 1 and 2, 2010 in the jungles of Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh.
Pandey’s widow had moved the apex court seeking independent probe into the encounter killing of her husband and Azad.
She said that no fair investigation was possible by the Andhra Pradesh police as the director general of police and the governor had already said that the encounter was genuine.
The matter will come up for hearing after six weeks.