Encounter killings by police
An encounter is a euphemism used in India since the late 20th century to describe extra-judicial killings by the police or the armed forces of suspected gangsters or terrorists in gun battles. In a fake encounter, the police or armed forces kill the suspects when they are either in custody or are unarmed, and then claim to have shot them in self-defence. In such cases, the police may plant weapons on or near the corpses to provide a justification for killing the individual. To explain the discrepancy between records that show that the individual was in police custody at the time of his "encounter", the police may say that the suspect had escaped. Such killings are not authorised by any court or by the law.
In the 1990s and the mid-2000s, the Mumbai Police used encounter killings to cripple the city's underworld and break down a rampant extortion racket. The police officers, who came to be known as "encounter specialists", believed that these killings delivered speedy justice. They were criticised by human rights activists.