Booker Prize winner and Indian activist Arundhati Roy called Sunday for a probe into a police shooting of two Muslim men who authorities have said were behind a string of bombings across India.
Anti-terror police acting on a tip-off last month shot dead two suspects living in a Muslim neighbourhood in the Indian capital, allegedly after the men first opened fire on a top police officer who later died.
Police went on to identify the slain men, as well as others they later arrested, as the "masterminds" of little-known militant group Indian Mujahideen that has claimed responsibility for several recent deadly terror attacks.
But some Indian politicians, journalists and Muslim leaders have increasingly expressed unease with the police version of events and claims the men were terrorist masterminds, and are calling for an independent inquiry.
"I am just one of the thousands of people who are asking some very serious questions of the police," said Roy in an interview to be aired on Indian news channel CNN-IBN Sunday, according to a statement from the programme's producers.
"I am not saying it's fake. I am saying let's have an inquiry," said Roy, who won the Booker Prize in 1997 for "A God of Small Things". "I am not dismissing the fact that, of course, they may be real terrorists. There are real terrorists, (but) who are they, are these boys the real ones?"
The pressure has been high on Indian police to find the perpetrators of serial bombings in at least four major cities this year that left 130 dead and many more wounded.
But praise for the Delhi police has given way to doubts as anti-terror police in other Indian states arrested additional men that they too identified as the top leaders of the shadowy militant outfit.
On Wednesday, a city court asked the police to explain how a leading weekly magazine managed to interview the accused, prominent lawyer Prashant Bhushan told AFP, noting that the men had not yet been given access to legal counsel. "This amounts to criminal contempt of court and defamation," Bhushan told AFP. "It's a case of a gross offence by the police."
The National Human Rights Commission has also asked the police for a report. Rights activists have also questioned why Indian police frequently seem unable to take suspects alive and suggested that many innocents are killed in "encounter killings," as the deadly shootouts by police are known here.