Muzaffarnagar: A bomb exploded inside a mosque in Muzaffarnagar’s Bhumma village in western Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday night. The Imam and half a dozen men in the mosque sustained injury in the resulting blast.
The blast was seen as retaliation to a murder of a youth, Satveer Kashyap on Monday in front of the mosque in
Bhumma by three men who belonged to the minority community.
The Imam, Mohammad Muneer, told the police that someone hurled two bombs inside the mosque. However, some others claimed that the bombs were already planted on its premises, the India Today reported.
Within 24 hours, on Tuesday, two bombs were allegedly hurled at the mosque and police have recovered a third crude live bomb from the mosque.
Tension prevailed on Monday when Satveer was shot dead allegedly by his former friends. Satveer’s younger brother Arjun Kashyap said, “Satveer had managed to control a mob of the minority community on September 7, 2013. Since then Mohammad Yaqub, Mona Saleem and Afzal Islam, who were his friends once, have been seeking an opportunity to kill him.” He said the policemen had called Satveer to a tea stall. “When he was going there, the killers shot him dead,” Arjun said.
The police said the angry villagers took to stone pelting and firing.
“Several Muslims who live close to the area took refuge in the mosque. They remained there till Tuesday afternoon till we rescued them after dispersing the mob,” The Indian Express quoted a senior police officer as saying.
Police suspect that the intention of the culprits was to provoke communal disturbance in the area.
Senior Superintendent of Police of Muzaffarnagar, KB Singh, told Mail Today, “The police force has been deployed at several places in the district to maintain peace. The policemen who were posted there on Monday night including SHO Mohammad Shoyeb and two constables have already been suspended for dereliction of duty. A probe is going on in last night’s incident and the culprits would be nabbed soon.”
He said Satveer’s alleged killers, Mohammad Yaqub and Mona Saleem, have been arrested. But Afzal Islam and an unidentified killer were at large.
Muzaffarnagar happens to be one of the most communally sensitive places of UP and has witnessed many such incidents in the past few years.