The Madurai Bench of the Madras High Court on Wednesday issued notices to three deputy tehsildars who had reportedly ordered the police to fire at protestors in Tamil Nadu’s Thoothukudi on May 22 and May 23. The court directed P Sekar, M Kannan and Chandran to respond to the charges against them, PTI reported.

Thirteen people agitating against the expansion of the Vedanta Group’s Sterlite Copper plant in the coastal town were killed in the firing.

Justices CT Selvam and Basheer Ahamed, who heard a plea filed by petitioner N Muthu Amuthanathan, said the police action could not be justified. Amuthanathan argued that the chief secretary and Director General of Police TK Rajendran had failed in their duties and sought a court-monitored investigation by a special investigation team, The Times of India reported.

Sekar, Kannan and Chandran have blamed the protestors for being violent and claimed that this forced them to issue the orders to open fire. In his First Information Report, Sekar alleged that the protestors had hurled petrol bombs, burnt vehicles and attacked security personnel with an “intention to murder”. He claimed 10,000 protestors had marched to the collectorate with “deadly weapons”.

For more than two decades, activists in Thoothukudi have accused Sterlite of contaminating the region’s air and water resources, causing breathing disorders, skin diseases, heart conditions and cancer among the region’s residents. Since February, there have been large-scale protests in Thoothukudi, where Sterlite ran a copper smelter with the capacity to produce 4.38 lakh tonnes of anodes per annum, or 1,200 tonnes per day.

The state government has now ordered the closure of the smelter and the State Industries Promotion Corporation of Tamil Nadu has cancelled the land allotted to Vedanta for the proposed expansion of the plant.