“Man on TV not my son”, Sabyasachi’s mother tells Naidu panel

Odisha Sun Times Bureau
Bhubaneswar, Jan 7:

Krishna Devi, mother of top Maoist leader Sabyasachi Panda’ today told the Justice AS Naidu commission of inquiry, which is probing the murder of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and the subsequent riots in Kandhamal district of Odisha in 2008, that the man who gave the interview on television owning up to the murder was not his son.

“I know my son very well. The man who gave the interview post murder is not my son. The government is trying to frame him,” Kkrishna Devi told the commission when asked to identify the man on the TV screen.

This incidentally has been the consistent stand of Panda’s family members.

Panda’s lawyer shot back at the media asking, “How can you identify a person you don’t know? The man who gave the interview never claimed to be Sabyasachi Panda. The man was known by various names such as Sunil, Sarat etc. There is no way it can be claimed that he was Sabyasachi.”

Sabyasachi’s wife Subhashree Panda alias Milli Panda will depose before the commission tomorrow.

Sabyasachi, who was the state secretary of the outlawed CPI (Maoist) at the time, had told a select group of journalists from Bhubaneswar in an interview a few days after the incident that his outfit had killed Saraswati for what he called ‘spreading hatred among communities’.

The one man Justice AS Naidu Commission is probing the killing of Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati and the large scale ethno-communal riot that happened in Kandhamal in 2008 since 2012 after the demise of Justice Sarat Chandra Mohapatra, who was probing the riot since 2008.

The state government had set up the inquiry commission to probe different angles in the killing of Saraswati and the subsequent ethno-communal violence that left 38 people, most of them Christians, dead.

There were allegations that Sabyasachi masterminded the attack on the premises of Sanskrit Kanyashram at the Jalespata ashram in which Swami Laxmanananda Saraswati, Kishore Baba, Mata Bhaktimayee, Amrutanandji and Puranjan Gantayat were gunned down.

Panda was arrested by the Brahmapur police from a rented house in Brahmapur on July 17 2014 and has been charged with the murders of 25 security personnel and 34 civilians, including Laxmananand Saraswati.