The Commission's Director General (Investigation), D R Karthikeyan, will head the team, NHRC chairman Justice M N Venkatachalaiah announced at a function here on Monday.

Venkatachalaiah said that the Commission had taken ``suo motu cognizance' of Saturday's incident in Bhubaneshwar, where a German missionary and his two minor sons were torched alive by Bajrang Dal activists. He called upon the Governments concerned to account for such developments and said that a special investigative team under Karthikeyan would ``immediately visit'' Orissa. But he did not comment on the time-period, saying that ``investigations take their own time,'' but added that Karthikeyan was an ``able officer and knew what to do''.

Orissa would be first on the Director General's list but he would also go to Gujarat (toinvestigate the allegations of `forced conversions') and then the Union Government, the Judge said. ``Today I wrote to the Gujarat and Orissa Governments to tell us what happened and what they're going to do''.

The situation, when ``people are killed on religious grounds... is capable of no explanation,'' said the Judge who was `greatly disturbed'' by the incident. He dismissed queries of any `foreign hand' in the matter and believed that ``somewhere, something messed up''.