Man says he was forced to bury hundreds of rape & murder victims!!

Dakshina Kannada: A former sanitation worker from the Dalit community, who used to work with the Manjunatha temple in Dharmasthala in here in Karnataka, has surfaced with shocking revelations that he was forced to bury hundreds of bodies of females who were victims of rape and murder for two decades, from 1995 to 2014, while he was working with the temple. The man alleged that he was regularly directed by his supervisors, who are in the temple administration, to bury the bodies of women and minors, which bore clear marks of sexual assault. He added that he was given death threats to do the supervisors’s bidding.

According to a report by The News Minute, the state police have registered a case based on a complaint by the man, who decided to reveal what he has done and knows about after all these years because his deeds started haunting him and disturbing his normal life.

Dharmasthala is a pilgrimage town, and the Lord Manjunatha temple, which is run by influential people, draws lakhs of pilgrims every year.

According to the man, whose identity is not revealed because of his request for the same citing threats to his life, he started his career in the temple cleaning the Netravati river’s area close to the temple, but later, he was used to cover up evidence of the most horrific crimes.

He said that initially, he believed the bodies he buried were of people who committed suicides or accidents near the river. However, later, he noticed clear signs of violence. Many of the female bodies were found without clothes or underwear and bore marks of rape, strangulation etc. He even recounted being asked to bury a teenage girl of age between 12 and 15, who was wearing a school uniform shirt and bore clear signs of sexual assault. In another case, it was a woman’s body whose face was burned with acid.

He even testified that men were killed by suffocation and buried in forest areas in his presence.

He said in the complaint that when he first refused to dispose of a body without informing the police, he was beaten up and received death threats as well as his family from his supervisors.

He said that he fled Dharmasthala with his family in 2014 and has been living in anonymity in a neighbouring state in constant fear that he, along with his family, will be murdered.

Recently, he exhumed one of the bodies in secret and submitted it along with a photograph of the same with the complaint. He informed in the complaint that he is ready to show the places where he buried the bodies in Dharmasthala in the presence of police.

He also submitted he would name all those people involved in the huge crime once he was granted protection under the Witness Protection Scheme, 2018.