Indian Police Exhume Human Remains in Mass-Burial Probe

The Indian police have exhumed human remains in a temple town in the country's south, officials said, as part of an investigation into allegations that hundreds of murder and rape victims were secretly buried there from around the mid-1990s.

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BENGALURU —

The probe centers on Dharmasthala, home to an 800-year-old temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva in the state of Karnataka and is drawing media attention nationwide.

A former cleaner at the temple told the police in July that he had been forced by superiors to dispose of hundreds of bodies over two decades, many of them women and girls showing signs of sexual assault. His allegations were made in a police complaint dated July 4 and seen by Reuters.

The man, whose identity the authorities have withheld for safety reasons, fled Dharmasthala in 2014 but said he was compelled to speak out now because of lingering guilt.

“If the skeletons now exhumed receive respectful funeral rites, those tormented souls will find peace and my sense of guilt could also decrease,” he wrote in the complaint.