New Delhi: A 35-year-old Muslim man was beaten to death by a group of Hindu men in Aligarh late on Tuesday (June 18), leading to communal tension in the communally sensitive city in western Uttar Pradesh.
While the actual reason behind the assault has not been independently ascertained, police said the persons who lynched the Muslim man suspected him of attempting to steal from a Hindu trader’s house.
The victim was identified as Farid alias Aurangzeb.
His brother Mohammed Zaki, in his police complaint, said the assaulters had identified Farid as a Muslim.
Police lodged an FIR against ten persons, all of them Hindus, and ten to 12 other unidentified persons under charges of murder, unlawful assembly, rioting with a deadly weapon, wrongful restraint and committing a crime with common intention.
Four persons had been arrested as of Wednesday afternoon, said police.
A video of the accused persons surrounding Farid at a small crossing in Aligarh and thrashing him with lathis and assaulting him with kicks and punches was widely shared on social media.
According to the FIR lodged at the Gandhi Park police station on Zaki’s complaint, Farid was returning at around 10:15 pm on June 18 after making rotis when he was confronted by some locals near a bylane (gali Rangrezan) in mohalla (locality) Mamu-Bhanja.
They attacked him with the intention to kill him and “identified him as a Muslim,” said Zaki in his complaint, seen by The Wire. He described it as a case of “mob lynching”.
The persons accused of murdering Farid were identified as Ankit Varshney, Chirag Varshney, Sanjay Varshney, Rishabh Pathak, Anuj Agrawal, Monu Pathak, Pandit Vijaygarhwala, Kamal Bansal, Dimpy Agrawal and Rahul Agrawal.
Aligarh city’s superintendent of police Mrigank Shekhar Pathak said four persons were arrested and efforts were on to arrest the other accused persons after identifying them through CCTV footage.
Pathak said that an injured Farid was taken to a hospital, where he died during treatment.
“Prima facie it has come to notice that the persons who attacked him suspected him of entering their house with the intent of theft,” said Pathak.
A large group of angry locals from the Muslim community gathered outside the Malkhan Singh hospital where Farid was taken and demanded action against the culprits.
Shaz Ishaq alias Ajju Ishaq, a Samajwadi Party leader and former assembly election candidate from Koil seat, who was present at the site, said there was immense anger among the locals.
Ishaq claimed that the accused men also forced Farid to chant some slogans while they were beating him. They also hit local people who tried to offer water to Farid when he helplessly begged for it, said Ishaq.
“There is jungle raj in UP. Police is not doing its job,” said Ishaq.
On June 19, Hindutva activists and traders from the Hindu community staged a dharna protesting against the police action against the accused persons and demanded that they not carry out further arrests.
With members of both communities coming out on the streets, the area was boiling with communal tension, but no untoward incident was reported.
Some media channels reported that there were incidents of stone-pelting, but the Aligarh police was quick to dismiss such reports as false.
Sanjiv Suman, Aligarh’s senior superintendent of police, said there was no stone-pelting reported from any area in Aligarh. “There was some tension between the two communities,” he said.
In a video statement on June 19 evening, Suman repeated the same sequence of events that the police did immediately after the incident.
“Last night, police received some information from the Gandhi Park area. Upon reaching there, it came to light that a Muslim youth entered a Hindu household with the intent of theft. The family and some other locals assaulted him.”
Suman said that Farid’s body was sent for post-mortem and that the burial was carried out peacefully. The officer added that the police had received a bunch of demands from both communities and were taking action as per the law.
“The situation is under control, and law and order is stable,” he said.
