New Delhi: Army jawan Jitendra Malik whose involvement is suspected in the murder of a police inspector during the violence in UP’s Bulandshahr over alleged cow slaughter has been handed over to the Uttar Pradesh police.
Jitendra Malik alias Jeetu was reportedly handed over to the Special Task Force (STF) at 12:50am. “He has accepted that he was there when the crowd started gathering. Prima facie, it has been found true. It's not yet ascertained if he is the one who shot the inspector. He said he went there with villagers, but denied pelting stones on the police. Forensic examination of his mobile phone will be done," said SSP Abhishek Singh who is part of the STF.
The soldier has denied shooting the inspector or Sumit, a 20-year-old local who also died in the clashes. “I don’t know anything about it," ANI quoted him as saying.
Jeetendra Malik, who was posted in Jammu, is the 11th suspect named in the FIR lodged at Siyana police station on December 4.
Sedition is one of the 17 charges in the FIR in which 27 people have been named besides 50-60 unidentified people. They were allegedly involved in the violence that led to the killing of Inspector Subodh Singh and Sumit Kumar.
The violence was triggered after cattle carcasses were found outside Mahav village strewn in the fields of former village head Rajpal Chaudhary, who also has been named in the FIR along with five more men from the village. All of them are absconding.
Sources said Jeetu had come to the village on leave and was "present at the site of violence" but left soon after the incident on Monday afternoon. His elder brother is also in the Army.
"Both of my sons are in the Army. They are not here, they on duty," his mother Ratan Kaur told PTI, adding the police had raided her house around 1 am Tuesday, assaulted her daughter-in-law, vandalised the house and picked up her husband, Rajpal Singh.
The 60-year-old woman said she was away in Pipala village at the house of her elder daughter-in law as her family had suffered a bereavement recently. She said she returned home only on Wednesday
Speaking to a TV news channel on Friday, she had said, "Jeetu is in Kargil and if any evidence like a picture or a video emerges showing he killed the policeman then I will kill him myself. I'm not so heartless, I'm equally pained by the death of the policeman and the other boy from Chingrawathi and also for what the entire village and its people are going through."
Jeetendra's wife Priyanka, 24, also supported her mother-in-law's claim of post-midnight vandalism and assault by the police. "I was at home with my father-in-law and my three- month-old baby when the police came to our house. They assaulted me so badly that my hand got fractured and I suffered an injury in one ear," she told PTI over phone from a hospital in Meerut.
Sumit Kumar, from Chingrawathi village, who died in the clash is among those named in the FIR which also accuses Bajrang Dal's Bulandshahr unit convenor Yogesh Raj, local BJP worker Shikhar Agarwal among others of instigating violence.
According to the FIR, the suspects were booked on the charges of mischief by fire or explosive substance, murder, attempt to murder, sedition, rioting, voluntary assault on public servant to obstruct them from performing their duty and endangering life or personal safety of others.
They have also been booked for destroying public property, among others.
(With PTI inputs)
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