In a miraculous turn of event, one Satkhothang Kipgen, 49, of Manipur’s Kangpokpi district, previously presumed dead in the raging ethnic violence between two communities returned home alive on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, an unidentified male’s dead body was fished out from a river on Wednesday, prompting the families whose near and dear ones went missing in the ongoing ethnic crisis to wait eagerly for its identification.
Kipgen, the “dead man”, revealed that he simply lost his way after consuming a lot of liquor. He was found alive by a team of Manipur police along the national highway near Longjang village on Tuesday in Kangpokpi district.
He was accorded as a “fallen hero” who died “in defence of our ancestral land and freedom” by the media cell of the Kuki Students Organization. The Committee of Tribal Unity (CoTU) had alleged that Kipgen was abducted by armed miscreants on 30 September and had called a shutdown on NH 37 to protest.
Meanwhile, in the Churachandpur incident, owing to its high decomposition state of the unidentified dead body, the identity as well as the cause of death could not be established.
Soon after the body was found floating in the river around noon, a team of Churachandpur police station rushed there and retrieved it using ropes before depositing it at the mortuary of the district’s hospital there for autopsy.
An Unnatural Death (UD) case has been registered at the station under section 174 CrPC for investigation.
To date, as many as 175 people were killed, 1108 injured and 32 went missing since the unceasing conflict unfolded on May 3. Of the total number of fatalities, nine are still unidentified, official sources said.
On the other hand, members of the Joint Students’ Body (JSB) of the district stepped up their poster campaign for justice in Churachandpur on Wednesday, seeking a high-level probe into the killing and sexual assault cases of the people of the community in the on-going conflict.
They demanded that the incidents, including the burning alive of a mother-son in an ambulance, be probed by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI).
As a mark of symbolic protest, the protestors displayed posters and hung effigies at various places in the district to indicate insecurity of life and denial of justice .
