The Madras High Court today has directed the Andhra Pradesh government to register a murder case under Section 302 of the IPC on the Chitoor killings.

Yesterday, the HC directed the government that the bodies of the six persons, gunned down in an encounter in the Seshachalam forests in Andhra Pradesh, be preserved until Friday when it will take up the matter.

The bodies would be preserved in a mortuary in Thiruvannamalai District Headquarters government hospital.

Relatives of the two of the men killed in the Andhra Pradesh police operation against alleged red sanders smugglers, have staged a protest in Tiruvannamalai district of Tamil Nadu demanding a proper probe into the incident which left 20 people, many of them Tamils, dead.

Twenty people, many of them woodcutters from Tamil Nadu, were gunned down on Tuesday in Andhra Pradesh's Chittoor district in an operation said to be against red sanders smugglers that came under severe attack from the government and political parties in neighbouring Tamil Nadu.