Group clash in Malkangiri: Prohibitory order imposed in two villages

Malkangiri Additional Superintendent of Police Raj Kishore Das said that the situation was under control after the deployment of additional forces of Odisha Police and BSF

Prohibitory orders were clamped in two villages in Odisha’s Malkangiri district following a clash between two groups over the alleged killing of a tribal woman whose headless body had been recovered from a river, police said on Monday.

At least a dozen houses were damaged, some vehicles destroyed, and nearly four houses set on fire by the mob. (Representative file photo)

The development stems from the killing of a 51-year-old tribal woman whose headless body was recovered from a riverbank last week.

Police officials in Malkangiri said the violence unfolded on Sunday evening.

On Sunday, hundreds of tribal men and women of Rakhelguda village, carrying weapons, assembled at MV-26 village and attacked houses.

The group forcibly entered homes, destroyed property, looted shops, and set some houses on fire in MV-26 village. Police said that two persons have been detained while many people have fled from MV-26 village.

“The situation is now under control after the deployment of additional forces,” said Malkangiri Additional Superintendent of Police Vinod Patil.

Personnel from Odisha Police, Border Security Force, Odisha Fire Service, and the Odisha Disaster Rapid Action Force have been stationed in the affected areas. Senior officials including DIG (South Western) Kanwar Vishal Singh, Malkangiri Collector Somesh Kumar Upadhyay visited the villages and convened a peace committee meeting with representatives from both communities.

The immediate trigger for the clash was the discovery of the headless body of a widowed Koya tribal woman Lake Padiami from Rakhelguda village, near the Poteru river on December 4.

According to police investigations, the roots of the tragedy lie in a land dispute between Padiami and Sukumar Mandal, who had been cultivating her land as a sharecropper for the past decade following her husband’s death.

Last year, with her son having come of age, Padiami decided to terminate the sharecropping arrangement and reclaim her land for family cultivation. This decision sparked escalating tensions between the two parties throughout the year.

On December 1, Podiami went to her field for paddy harvesting, carried three bundles of paddy to the drying yard, and never returned home. When she failed to come back, her son filed a missing person’s report the same day, suspecting that Sukumar and his associates had kidnapped and murdered his mother, disposing of her body in the river to destroy evidence.

Police arrested Subharanjan Mondal, 45, a hailing from MV-26, in connection with the case on Sunday.

On December 5, members of the Adivasi community, led by Mukunda Podiami, president of the Koya Samaj, assembled at MV-26 demanding the immediate arrest of the culprits and recovery of the missing head.