Siyanand Mishra, the father of the class 12 student who was chased and shot dead by cow vigilantes in Haryana's Faridabad on the early morning of August 24, made an alarming statement on Tuesday when he recounted a meeting with his son's killer in a local jail.
“He said he thought my son was a Muslim. Now he regrets killing a Brahmin,” Mishra recalled the notorious criminal locally known as 'Monu Manesar' telling him after touching his feet and apologising for "mistakingly" killing his son.
Mishra's son, 19-year-old Aryan Mishra was chased for 25 kilometres by Monu Manesar and gang before being shot dead. Aryan was out with his friends Harshit and Shanky in an SUV to eat noodles.
According to police, the attackers mistook the boys for "cow smugglers" and followed the SUV before opening fire at the car. A bullet shattered the rear window and struck Aryan, who was sitting in the front passenger seat.
After Aryan was hit, Harshit, who was driving the car, stopped the vehicle. The attackers then approached and fired a second shot directly into Aryan's chest, resulting in his death. Aryan was rushed to a nearby hospital, but he died a day later.
Less than three days after the incident, on August 27, a Muslim rag-picker from West Bengal named Sabir was beaten to death by cow vigilantes in Haryana because "they thought that he had consumed beef."
According to the FIR registered at the Badhra police station in Charkhi Dadr, Sabir along with another migrant worker from Assam named Asiruddin were called by the attackers to the local bus stand on the pretext of disposing some scrap.
“On the morning of August 27, a group of young men came to Sabir, a rag picker, living in a slum area near Badhra village, and took him to the local bus stand, claiming that they had some scrap to dispose of. The cow vigilantes also called another person named Asiruddin, a rag picker to the bus stand,” the FIR detailed.
“The cow vigilantes started mercilessly beating up the two rag pickers. When the passers-by intervened, the criminals took the victims to some other location on their motorcycles,” it said.
According to police, 26-year-old Sabir's dead body was later found near a canal in Bhandwa village while an unconscious Asiruddin was found dumped at another location.
Charkhi Dadri Superintendent of Police Ms Pooja Vashisth confirmed that the attackers unleashed the brutality on the Muslim men merely because they thought that the two had consumed beef. Distressing enough, two of the accused nabbed by the police are juveniles.
"So far five persons namely Abhishek, Ravinder, Mohit, Kamaljeet, and Sahil have been arrested and two of them are juveniles,” Vashisth told media.
However, Haryana Chief Minister Nayab Singh Saini's response to the killing was: Villagers revere the cow and if they sense some untoward situation, then "who could stop them?"
He further stressed that there is no compromise on "cow protection."
"It is not right to say things like mob lynching, because a strict law has been made in the Assembly for cow protection and there is no compromise on it," he said.
"I want to say that such incidents should not happen and these incidents are unfortunate," he plainly added.