Kid-glove treatment for Alwar lynching accused
JAIPUR/ALWAR:Almost a fortnight after Pehlu Khan, the 55-year-old dairy farmer from Nuh in Haryana, was murdered in Alwar, the Rajasthan police say they will not arrest the six people named in the FIR before interrogating them to make sure they were involved in the crime.
Alwar SP Rahul Prakash said they were raiding various places to nab the six people named in the FIR who are absconding since April 5 but added that they would only be detained for interrogation. “We will arrest them only after we are sure that they were involved in the crime,” he said.
Earlier, on April 5, Prakash announced a reward of ₹5,000 each on the six accused for information leading to their arrests.
The FIR was registered against six named and 200 unidentified people on the basis of Khan’s statement to police around 11pm on April 1 when the farmer was in the intensive care unit of Kailash Hospital in Behror in Alwar .
In his statement, Khan named Om Yadav, 45; Hukum Chand Yadav, 44; Sudhir Yadav, 45; Jagmal Yadav, 73; Naveen Sharma, 48; and Rahul Saini, 24, for the attack on him and four others with him who were carrying cattle from a weekly market in Jaipur to their village in Nuh.
On the basis of Khan’s statement, police registered a case against these six and 200 others under sections 147 (rioting), 143 (unlawful assembly), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt), 341 (wrongful restraint), 308 (culpable homicide), 379 (theft) of the IPC. On April 3, section 308 was changed to that of murder after Khan died.
On April 5, police arrested three people — Vipin Yadav, Ravindra Yadav and Kalu Ram Yadav — on the basis of video footage circulating on social media. Two more people, Dayanand Yadav and Neeraj Yadav, were arrested on April 9. They were not named in the FIR. Saddam Hussain, president of Mewat Yuva Sanghtan, alleged that police were soft on the named accused because of their affiliations with right-wing organisations.