'Encounter cop' led similar operation in Warangal in 2008

HYDERABAD: In 2008, three men threw acid on 20-year-old Pranitha and her friend, Swapnika, in Warangal. S Srinivas (25), D Sanjay (22) and P Harikrishna (24) allegedly attacked the women as Swapnika had spurned Srinivas. Protests demanding justice for the two gripped then undivided Andhra. Three days after the attack, the accused were killed in an “encounter”.
V C Sajjanar was Warangal SP then.Eleven years later, four men accused of raping and murdering a veterinarian in Cyberabad, which Sajjanar heads now, met the same fate.
A 1996 batch IPS officer, the mild-mannered Sajjanar was a low-profile policeman till this episode, after which he earned the sobriquet “encounter cop”. He became a hero for acting swiftly in effecting the arrests within 48 hours of the attack on the women and the encounter within three days. Pranitha and Swapnika, their families, and people across the state welcomed the ‘encounter’.
While police faced flak for mishandling the veterinarian rape-murder case, Sajjanar was silently strategising. The killing of four accused in the early hours of Friday near Shamshabad was reminiscent of the Warangal ‘encounter’ 11 years ago.
Senior cops recall that Sajjanar was up and running when the two students of Kakatiya College of Technology, Warangal, were attacked by the trio. Sajjanar claimed the trio was shot dead in self-defence when they attacked the cops after they were taken to Mamnoor on the outskirts of Warangal to retrieve the acid bottle and the stolen motorbike. Police said the trio tried to attack them with country weapons and acid bottles which they had allegedly hidden. Police retaliated and the trio was killed in the ‘encounter’.
In an eerie similarity, Sajjanar claimed Friday’s encounter occurred when two of the accused attacked the cops and the other two snatched their weapons and tried to fire. “They were killed in the crossfire,” he said.
Sajjanar, a native of Hubballi in Karnataka, began his career as an assault commandant in Greyhounds, the elite anti-Naxal force, and was additional SP in Jangaon in 1997. He went on to head the police in five Naxal-prone districts — Nalgonda, Warangal, Kadapa, Guntur and Medak. “An IPS officer getting control of five districts as SP is also a rare instance,” an ex-IPS officer said.
When Sajjanar was in charge of anti-Naxal operations in the erstwhile Khammam in 2000, he was sent to Odisha to train police after a series of attacks on police stations by Maoists. “He led the special intelligence branch for almost three years and it was under him that gangster Nayeemuddin was killed in an encounter two years ago,” an officer said.
Sajjanar had also done a stint with Counter Intelligence Wing, which deals with terror-related activities. As head of EOW in the CID, he went after multi-level marketing firms for duping people. Under him, cases were booked against Amway and Japan Life. “Some organisations shut their businesses in undivided AP when he was SP of EOW,” an inspector recalled.
(The victim's identity has not been revealed to protect her privacy as per Supreme court directives on cases related to sexual assault)