Patna: After visiting the village in Khagaria
district where 16 people were killed by suspected Naxalites,
Bihar deputy chief minister S K Modi on Friday said the massacre
appeared to be the fall-out of a dispute over a plot of land
which the victims were cultivating in riverine area.
"A probe will also be conducted to find out whether there
was any political conspiracy involved in the violence as
there has been no intelligence inputs in the recent past about
the possibility of violence of such a scale in Khagaria",
he told reporters here after submitting a report to Chief
Minister Nitish Kumar.
He slammed the opposition RJD-LJP front for allegedly
"whipping up caste tension" in the wake of the carnage.
"Sinister attempts are being made by the opposition front
to whip up tension on the basis of castes... it was reflected
from RJD supremo Lalu Prasad and his LJP counterpart Ramvilas
Paswan's statements naming castes of people involved in the
incident", Modi alleged.
Police of the three neighbouring districts of Khagaria
have been alerted and raids are being carried out to apprehend
the killers, he said.
Referring to the protest at the carnage-site against
the state government, Modi said initially a handful of people
allegedly owning allegiance to RJD and LJP tried to misbehave
with the ministerial team during its visit but others who were
present were silent.
The post-mortem of the bodies were carried out on the
spot and handed over to their relatives. The villagers had
earlier stopped the police from taking the bodies for
post-mortem.
Bureau Report
First Published: Friday, October 02, 2009, 20:17