New Delhi: It was meant to be a routine late-night food delivery assignment for Mohammad Aslam. But it turned out to be a horror for him as four men allegedly assaulted him, subjected him to communal slurs, poured liquor over him and held him hostage for over an hour in a single-storey house in Uttar Pradesh’s capital Lucknow.
Aslam has alleged that he was targeted over his Muslim identity and beaten up by the residents of a house where he had gone to deliver food late on the intervening night of August 20 and 21.
Police lodged a criminal case based on Aslam’s complaint and have so far arrested one of the four accused persons.
Aslam works as a food delivery agent with Zomato. On the night of August 20, he received two orders, one of which was to a location in the Vineet Khand locality of Lucknow’s Gomti Nagar area. Upon reaching the location, Aslam said he asked the resident customer to come down to the gate and pick up his order.
But, Aslam said, the man on the other end of the phone asked him to come up to the first floor. “I refused initially because I had another delivery to make. But then he told me that he was eating and couldn’t come down. Out of humanity, I decided to climb up and hand over the parcel to him,” Aslam told The Wire.
When he reached the first floor, Aslam said one of the men berated him for their earlier telephonic conversation when he refused to come up initially. The four men were drinking, recalled Aslam.
Things turned hostile as one of them allegedly pulled him by his collar and dragged him inside the house. Aslam alleged that the men hit him and quizzed him about his identity.
“They asked me for my name and due to my Muslim name, tortured me even more,” Aslam said in his written police complaint.
He alleged that the accused men hit him on his head with the helmet he was carrying. They also poured a glass full of liquor on him, he said, adding that they threatened to pour boiling water on him.
That’s not where it ended. Aslam alleged that the four men kept him hostage in the room for 1.5 hours and seized his phone, due to which he could not attend to the other orders.
The men let him go after threatening him and allegedly forcing him to sign an application saying that it was him who had overcharged them for the food and misbehaved with them and that he would not raise the issue outside.
In the FIR, Aslam, who has been working as a delivery agent for two years, also alleged that the men threatened to shoot him.
Despite facing communal slurs, Aslam said he wanted to move past that aspect of the incident for the sake of communal harmony.
“They were talking nonsense. I don’t want to repeat it because I don’t want it to become a Hindu-Muslim thing,” he said.
The FIR was lodged under sections pertaining to voluntarily causing hurt, criminal intimidation, wrongful restraint and intentional insult with intent to breach peace.
Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police, Lucknow, Pankaj Kumar Singh said the main accused in the case was arrested while attempts were on to nab the other three.
Singh said that the four men assaulted Aslam after there was some “dispute” during the delivery. Further legal action is being taken, he added.
