LUCKNOW: The killing of a 19-year-old college girl in an alleged ‘love jihad’ case in Ballabhgarh of Haryana found its echo at Raghunathpur village in Hapur district of western Uttar Pradesh where Vishwa Hindu Parishad, Bajrang Dal, and Karni Sena held a mahapanchayat on Wednesday demanding capital punishment for the killers.
The girl was allegedly shot dead on Monday by her stalker and his friend after a botched abduction attempt in Haryana’s Ballabhgarh.
As per the sources, hundreds of people from 60 villages with a sizeable Rajput population attended the mahapanchayat to seek adequate compensation for the victim’s family and a fast track court to try the accused.
A senior police official of Hapur claimed that around 200 to 300 people participated in the mahapanchayat which lasted for three hours amid heavy police deployment. The mahapanchayat organisers later handed over a memorandum to the acting sub-divisional magistrate Pankaj Saxena.
The sources said that the leaders of VHP, Bajrang Dal and Karni Sena addressed the mahapanchayat and expressed annoyance over the incident linking it to alleged forced conversion. They said that the same accused had allegedly kidnapped the girl in 2018 and the matter was settled through a compromise.
The leaders of the outfits said that they would launch a movement if justice was denied to the woman’s family, which is originally from Raghunathpur.
Both the accused -- Tauseef and his friend Rehan -- were arrested by the police from Mewat on Tuesday. The sources claimed that Tauseef revealed that he killed the victim as she was planning to get married to someone rejecting his offer of 'friendship' and conversion to Islam.
It is said that the accused belongs to a strong political family.