SHADNAGAR, India: A forensic official holds a gun as police officers gather around the body of man at the site where police officers shot dead four detained gang-rape and murder suspects on Friday. - AFP

SHADNAGAR, India: A top Indian rights group launched an investigation yesterday into a police shooting of four rape-murder suspects, after accusations they were gunned down to assuage public anger. News of the investigation came as the country reeled after the death on Friday of a woman who had been set on fire on her way to a sexual assault hearing. Police said that they shot the four suspects, who had been in custody for a week, early Friday after they snatched officers' guns during a re-enactment at the crime scene organized by detectives.

Their deaths prompted celebrations, with hundreds heading to the scene and showering officers with flower petals, as politicians, celebrities and sports stars congratulated police on social media. Yesterday morning, police were still at the scene outside Hyderabad in southern India as motorists stopped their cars on the busy highway to look and take photos with their phones. Others have expressed horror however, with one Supreme Court lawyer calling it "murder in cold blood" and Amnesty International saying the "alleged extrajudicial execution" should be investigated.

Veteran politician Kapil Sibal warned that "savage Taleban-style justice… will make courts irrelevant." The operation was overseen by a police officer involved in two similar incidents including when three acid attack suspects were killed in a forest in 2008, the Indian Express daily reported yesterday. Late on Friday the High Court in the southern state of Telangana where the incident happened ordered that the bodies be preserved until Monday evening and that their autopsies be filmed.

A team from the National Human Rights Commission was expected at the scene later yesterday. The Commission said that it was concerned that the killings would "send a wrong message to society". "If, the arrested persons were actually guilty, they were to be punished as per law pursuant to the directions of the competent court," a statement said.

'Lynch them'

The four men had, according to police, confessed during interrogation to gang-raping and murdering on November 27 the 27-year-old vet before setting fire to her body under a bridge. The case prompted nationwide protests and calls for swift - and tough - justice from a slow and overburdened legal system that campaigners say all too often fails to convict rapists. India's last execution was in 2015.

After the men were arrested last Friday, hundreds of people laid siege to the police station where they were being held. One lawmaker called in parliament for the suspects to be "lynched". After they were killed on Friday, the pregnant 17-year-old wife of one of them told Indian media: "Take me to the same place and kill me too." The father of another called the deaths a "cold-blooded killing… Why did they punish them even before completing the legal process?" But the murdered woman's father said "justice was done".

Set on fire

Separately on Friday, a woman who had been set on fire on Thursday by men she had accused of raping her succumbed to her injuries in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. The victim, who suffered 90-percent burns, had told police that she was attacked by two men who had raped her and three others on her way to a court hearing. "Despite our best efforts, she did not survive," said Shalab Kumar, head of burn and plastic surgery at the Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi, according to the PTI newswire.

All five suspects have been arrested and are being questioned, senior policeman Suvendra Kumar Bhagat told AFP. The victim's brother told local media that said she would get justice when all those who killed her go to the place "where she has gone".

The woman was on her way to board a train in Unnao district of northern Uttar Pradesh state to attend a court hearing over her rape when she was doused with kerosene and set on fire on Thursday, according to police. She was airlifted to New Delhi for treatment later that day. The woman had filed a complaint with Unnao police in March alleging she had been raped at gun-point on Dec 12, 2018, police documents showed. The woman named two local men - one of them was arrested by police, the other absconded.

Having been subsequently jailed, the alleged rapist was released last week after securing bail, police officer S K Bhagat said in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh state. On Thursday, the rape victim was seized by five men, including the two people she had named in her complaint, and beaten, stabbed and set on fire, local media reported citing her statement to police. Still ablaze, she walked nearly a kilometre, seeking help before finally calling the police herself, according to Aaj Taj TV news channel.

All five of the accused have been arrested and are in 14-day judicial custody, Vikrant Vir, superintendent of police, Unnao, told Reuters. A fast-track court would hear the case and the guilty would not be spared, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath said. In an earlier incident in Unnao, a young woman had accused BJP Uttar Pradesh lawmaker Kuldeep Singh Sengar of raping her in 2017. In July last year, the victim and her lawyer were critically injured in a highway collision, when a truck hit the car in which they were travelling. The woman's two aunts, who were also in the car, were killed in the accident. Sengar denies the rape and any involvement in the car crash.

In another incident, police in southern India's Kerala state yesterday said that one of four men accused, but later acquitted, over the deaths of two girls in 2017 was beaten by an angry mob. Following an outcry over the acquittals in the case, which saw two girls aged 13 and nine hang themselves after being sexually abused, the local government has filed an appeal. - Agencies