BHOPAL: After booking three men, who have been lodged in jail for over a month, in connection with the Khargone communal violence that took place during Ram Navami procession on April 10, the Madhya Pradesh Police has been accused of wrongly slapping cases against two more persons.
While the family of Farid, who has been booked in connection with the violence in Khargone’s Sanjay Nagar area, claimed he was in hospital on the day the riots took place, Azam’s wife insisted he was not
in town.
Farid has been named in two cases of rioting registered at the Khargone police station on April 11 and 12, while Azam is a co-accused in the First Information Report (FIR) lodged on April 12. Farid’s sister-in-law Anjum Bi claimed he was in district hospital’s Orthopaedic Trauma Ward from April 9 to April 11 after being injured due to a fall.
“How can he commit a crime when he was in hospital? He has been untraceable since being discharged from the hospital on April 11. His phone is switched off. During the 2015 communal violence also, our kin were wrongly named in the FIR,” she alleged.
Farid’s brother Rafiq (Anjum Bi’s husband) and father Subaan are also among the 11 named in the FIR lodged on April 11. Azam, a loading vehicle driver, was not in Khargone when the violence took place, his wife Farida claimed. “He had left on April 8 with bakery products for Karnataka. On April 14, he called up from Indore and said he had been falsely named in the FIR. Since then, we don’t know where he is and are worried about his safety,” Farida said.
When questioned, Ankit Jaiswal, commandant of Madhya Pradesh Police’s Special Armed Force 25th Battalion, mantained that all the FIRs have been lodged on the complaints of the victims. ‘‘If the allegations of these people are found true, corrective action will be taken during investigations,” he said.