TUMAKURU: “If I had not lied to them that I hail from Madhugiri, they could have killed me. They gave the clothes of a dead person and abandoned me at Mallasandra,” recounted Gubbi Abhishek, the Dalit youth who had been stripped and beaten up on January 17.
The accused had torn off his clothes to ensure that he cannot run away from them.
He has been at the district general hospital’s special ward with two police personnel guarding him ever since the attack on him by a group recently.
The accused did not even offer a drop of water to him after torturing him for over three hours, he said.
Key accused Kadu Prakash along with over 10 accomplices had allegedly kidnapped the youth who had reportedly stalked the former’s 15- year-old daughter.
“I did not approach or stalk her. It is all false. She only had given her mother’s cell phone number to me during a Ganeshothsava when the procession passed through her area,” he claimed.
Kadu Prakash had snatched his cellphone and threw it in at an open well after destroying it, he alleged. “If they can give me my cell back, I will show them I did not do anything wrong,” he said.
He also claimed that the girl had advised him to not to return to Gubbi from his pilgrimage to Shabarimala on January 13 as she knew about her father hatching a plot to attack him.
Almost all of his relatives are from below poverty line families and work as daily wagers.