Lone Khairlanji massacre survivor dies of heart attack

Four members of the Bhotmange family were murdered by Kunbi caste locals

Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange was a witness to the murder of his family.

NAGPUR: The lone survivor of the 2006 Khairlanji massacre, Bhaiyyalal Bhotmange, died of heart attack at a hospital in Nagpur on Friday.

Bhotmange’s wife Surekha, daughter Priyanka, and two sons — Sudhir and Roshan — were murdered in front of their house in Khairlanji village, Bhandara district, Maharashtra, by a mob of locals belonging to the Kunbi caste.

The mob was allegedly angered over a testimony given by Surekha and Priyanka, against some people from the village, in a case of assault on a Dalit man, Siddhartha Gajbhiye, from a neighbouring village. The testimony had led to the arrest of the villagers.

Bhotmange (62) was a witness to the murder of his family.

“He suffered a heart attack in afternoon and was brought to our hospital at 3.10 p.m. He died at 3.40 p.m. The heart attack had led to multiple organ failures, including that of his brain,” Sagar Bhagade from Nagpur’s Shrikrishna Heartcare hospital said.

Police inspector Rajan Mane, who was present in the hospital, said that there would a post mortem of Bhotmange body, as demanded by some activists and political leaders.

“After his family was killed, many organizations and social groups tried to help him. The culprits were arrested by the police. Some of them were convicted and some were acquitted. He was demanding punishment for all of them. The government gives honors to many people posthumously, but we demand that Bhaiyyalal should be given justice,” a senior Republican Party of India (Kawade) group leader Jogendra Kawade said.

Mr. Kawade said the last rites of Bhotmange would be performed on Saturday.

Bhotmange was provided a house by the State government and a job of a watchman at a tribal school in Bhandara.

He complained of uneasiness on Friday morning and was taken to a hospital in Bhandara by his neighbours, but the doctors advised him to go to Nagpur for better treatment.

The murders had triggered protests by Dalits in Maharashtra and other parts of India. Activists had contended that Surekha and Priyanka were “gang-raped and paraded naked” before being lynched by the mob.

A probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation was ordered into the incident by the State government.

Thirty-eight people were arrested for the murder and a fast track court convicted eight of them in 2008. Six out of the eight convicts were awarded death penalty by the fast track court, however, the Nagpur Bench of Bombay High Court commuted the penalties to life imprisonment in 2010.

Both the courts refused to term the incident as a “caste-based massacre” and called it “revenge killings”. The allegations of rape could not be proved in court as the private body parts of both the ladies were mutilated, allegedly to destroy evidence.

The case is pending before the Supreme Court.