Guwahati: India has got a new Supercop, a real-life Singham, in Cyberabad Police Commissioner VC Sajjanar. The encounter specialist has been hailed a hero after the early morning encounter in which the four persons accused in the chilling rape and murder of a 26-year-old Hyderabad veterinarian were shot dead in an encounter.
However Sajjanar is not new to encounters and is a specialist having handled many such cases.
Incidentally, the end met by the rapists is very similar to that met by three men accused of an acid attack in Telangana’s (then Andhra Pradesh’s) Warangal.
In December 2008, three men were arrested for attacking two college girls of Warangal’s Kakatiya Institute of Technology with acid. The trio had allegedly attacked the two girls because one of them had refused advances from one of them.
A few hours after their arrest, the trio was taken to the scene of crime, much like now, for investigative purposes. The three were killed when police opened fire in self-defense after they, cops said, tried to attack them with country-made weapons and acid that they’d hidden at the spot.
At the time too, people across Andhra and Telangana were demanding swift justice.
Sajjanar was then the Superintendent of Police in Warangal. Just like the Hyderabad rape and murder, in this case, too, the accused were arrested within 48 hours.
After the Warangal encounter, his involvement in many encounter operations, especially against Maoists, earned him the moniker “encounter cop”.
In May 2009, when Sajjanar was posted as District Superintendent in Warangal, one of Andhra’s then top Maoist leaders P Sudhadkar Reddy was killed by police in an encounter along with one of his colleagues.
Reddy, police said, was involved in a life attempt on former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu in 2003 and the assassination of former Andhra Pradesh Home Minister A Madhava Reddy in 2000.
Born in Hubli, Karnataka, Sajjanar is a 1996-batch IPS officer.
