BHOPAL: After receiving a complaint letter, the National Human Rights Commission ( NHRC ) has initiated a probe into the allegation that Melagaon blast accused Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur was illegally detained and tortured by the Maharashtra ATS and state police. Following directions of the NHRC and a change in government, the Maharashtra police sent a team of lady officers to Bhopal last month to record Pragya Thakur's statement on video. The statement was recorded at the Ved Khushilal Ayurvedic College where Pragya is undergoing treatment as the lower part of her body is now paralysed, which she claims is an outcome of the police atrocities. A copy of Pragya Thakur's statement is with TOI, in which she argued that the Maharashtra police beat her with leather belts through the nights, starved her for 24 days without even a morsel of food, gave her electric shocks, verbally abused her and made her listen to objectionable pornographic recordings in the company of male undertrials. When an undertrial objected at the Kala Chouki police station on October 26, 2008 - he was brutally beaten-up. Pragya Thakur is in the custody of the Bhopal jail as she is being tried for the murder of RSS worker Sunil Joshi, who was shot dead in Dewas in December 2007. The NIA was investigating a terror link in the Joshi murder case but finding no such connection, the case has been referred back to the Madhya Pradesh police. On November 18, a team of Maharashtra CID led Jayshree M Kulkarni recorded Pragya's statement after permission was granted by the Dewas sessions court. "I was tortured for 24 days by men of the police force. Whereas I am a woman," she said in her statement. According to the recorded statement, she was summoned by the Maharashtra police on October 10, 2008. She was illegally detained and tortured for the next 13 days because the ATS wanted her to acknowledge her involvement in the Malegaon blasts. Pragya Thakur named policemen including an inspector Khanwilkar, another policeman in plainclothes called Award, ATS inspector Suvarna Shinde, Paramveer Singh and one uniformed man she could not identify. "There were five to six policemen whose job was to abuse me in filthy language. They would beat me round the clock, night and day to keep me awake. The policemen who were given the job of beating me would change because they got tired. But my beatings would not stop," Pragya Thakur's statement said. The only break she would get from the beatings was when her arms would swell up with the battering and she would be given a container of warm water to soak her arms so they shrunk back to their normal size. Pragya Thakur claimed that in order to extract a confessional statement for the Malegaon blasts, the policemen even called her a "prostitute" linking her to a spiritual guru she considered like a father-figure. The statement maintained that she had repeatedly told the MCOCA Court in Mumbai of the excesses. On court's orders, she would be taken to the hospital for treatment but doctors would be instructed to write that I was fine and not give treatment. "Today, I can say that that the National Human Rights and Women's Commissions have lost utility. Purely on the basis of suspicion, what I have had to endure for six years is part of a conspiracy. The conspiracy which the then ruling government termed as saffron terrorism and by which an attempt was made to destroy this country's human compassion," she said in the video recording.