Arrested masked complainant admits he was enticed by group to stage mass burial drama

BENGALURU: The masked man, who is the anonymous complainant in the alleged mass burial case in Dharmasthala, was arrested by the special investigation team (SIT) after he admitted that he was enticed by some vested interest groups to create the story about the alleged mass burials. After his arrest, his name was revealed as Chinnaiah.

The police produced Chinnaiah before a court in Mangaluru which remanded him to 10 days in police custody.

While admitting to cooking up the story of the mass burials, Chinnaiah told the police that he had been living in Tamil Nadu and was contacted by a group of people in the last week of December last year. “Discussions were held in Tamil Nadu itself and they brought me to Dharmasthala. The entire plot was scripted by the group”, he said.

Two excavators were used for digging at Point 13 after scanning the ground with a ground-penetrating radar.

Chinnaiah was employed as a civic worker in Dharmasthala from 1995 to 2014 after which he moved to Tamil Nadu. He said a team was put together and the police were later approached. On July 11 this year, he appeared before a court with a skull in hand and claimed that he had buried hundreds of bodies of women and children who had been raped and murdered.

The anonymous complainant pointing towards a dried tree atop Ratnagiri Hills where he claimed to have buried a body.

On July 18, the state women’s commission wrote to the government seeking a probe into Chinnaiah’s claims and the government, which was initially reluctant, ordered setting up of an SIT on July 19.

Based on the identification by the masked complainant, the SIT carried out exhumation at 17 spots, but no human remains of women or children were found. At two places, skeletal remain were found, but they turned out to be of males, one of which looked like a suicide case.

The SIT had also questioned two former officials of the Dharmasthala gram panchayat, Raju and Tanasi, who stated that there had been no burials of rape and murder victims and bodies buried on the days mentioned by the complainant were buried by following due process.

As per the panchayat records, 264 bodies of dead people were buried during the period mentioned by the complainant as they had no claimants and the burials were duly recorded at the Dharmasthala outpost police station, the former gram panchayat officials told the police.

Protests were being held in several parts of the state.

Chinnnaiah had also claimed that the skull which he produced before the court had been dug up at Boliyar. The SIT, which had taken custody of it, had sent it for forensic analysis. Interestingly, the tests revealed that the mud samples present on the skull did not match with the mud from Boliyar area.