Indian police exhume human remains in temple mass-burial probe
Indian police have exhumed human remains in a temple town in southern India as part of an investigation into allegations that hundreds of murder and rape victims were secretly buried there since the mid-1990s.
The investigation focuses on Dharmasthala, home to an 800-year-old temple dedicated to Shiva in Karnataka state, and has attracted nationwide media attention, News.Az reports, citing Reuters.
A former temple cleaner told police last month that he was forced over two decades to dispose of hundreds of bodies, many of them women and girls showing signs of sexual assault. His complaint, filed on July 4, said he fled Dharmasthala in 2014 but came forward due to lingering guilt.
"If the skeletons now exhumed receive respectful funeral rites, those tormented souls will find peace and my sense of guilt could also decrease," the former cleaner wrote. Authorities are protecting him and his family.
The temple authorities have welcomed the probe, saying they hope it will uncover the truth. In his complaint, the former cleaner accused temple officials of orchestrating the burials and said he would identify them if he and his family were protected.
A special investigation team has so far recovered human remains from two of 16 suspected burial sites, according to senior police officials familiar with the case. Karnataka’s Interior Minister, Gangadharaiah Parameshwara, confirmed that bone fragments, soil samples, and other evidence have been collected for forensic testing.
"The analysis is ongoing. Only once that is complete can we say the investigation has truly begun," Parameshwara said, urging the public not to treat the case as a religious issue.
The revelations have renewed attention on older unsolved cases, including that of Padmalatha, a college student reportedly raped and murdered in Dharmasthala in 1986.
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