Audi mystery

accident. Rawat had previously been practising in UP’S Bareilly for around three years.

Asked about the sequence of events narrated by Ahmed and his family Friday, Indirapuram police station in-charge Pradeep Tripathi said they have sent a notice and are waiting for him to record his statement.

At Ahmed’s home in Labhera, his mother Saira Bao said, “First of all, he has never driven a car in his life. He drives a mini-truck. He was in Gujarat when you say this accident happened. He came home on Tuesday and cooked fish. He then left for Guwahati. Had anything happened, he would have called us.”

Speaking over phone, Ahmed said he was in Gujarat on January 28. “On January 6, I left for Sitarganj in Uttarakhand to load some spare parts at a factory. January 8, on the way back I stayed over at home and left for Udaipur the next day. On January 11, I left Udaipur and reached Ahmedabad the next day. On the night of January 27, I left Ahmedabad and reached Bareilly around 2 am on January 31. I have a sales tax receipt from Mugarra in Mathura at around noon on January 29. Later, I got stuck in a traffic jam that delayed my arrival in Bareilly.”

Asked about his driving licence and statement being part of court and police records, he said, “If that is true, then the court will recognise me. A copy of my driving licence may have been misused. I will be reaching court on February 10, things will become clear.”

Ahmed also denied that he knew SUV owner Manish Rawat, and claimed that on the evening of January 31, the day of his “surrender”, he was being interviewed by local media in Bareilly. However, many other residents of Labhera said they knew Rawat who was in Bareilly till 2015 and had performed an unsuccessful surgery on a boy from the village at a city hospital.

Another Labhera resident, Shakil Qureshi, who owns the mini-truck that Ahmed has been driving, said, “He had taken the vehicle from here on January 6, loaded goods from Sitarganj and left for Ahmedabad. He returned on January 30. He left for Guwahati on February 1.”

Other residents said they were surprised, too, to hear of Ahmed’s name cropping up in the case. “No one has ever seen him driving a car for anyone. He has never had such a job. On January 31, I met him near the Bareilly market and he said he was coming from Gujarat. I gave him a lift back home,” said Mohammed Imtiaz, Ahmed’s neighbour.

Labhera is a Muslim-majority village with many residents, mainly from the Qureshi community, operating minitrucks to transport cattle to slaughterhouses or agricultural produce to various markets.