Bulandshahr: Minors among 7 Muslims booked for cow slaughter

BULANDSHAHR: Minors aged 11 and 12 were among seven Muslims named in an FIR for cow slaughter that led to violence in Bulandshahr killing two including a police inspector and a local youth.

Surprisingly, the FIR in which the two minors have been named was registered following a complaint lodged by Yogesh Raj – a Bajrang Dal extremist and the main conspirator behind the mob violence which left Inspector Subodh Kumar Singh and a young man dead is on the run since the incident.

Villagers expressed shocked and said the minor boys named in the FIR for cow slaughter were actually attending ‘Tabligi Ijtema’, an Islamic congregation when the incident allegedly took place.

Two villagers of Naya Bans, Yasin Khan and Mohd Hussain, said some 100 police personnel had come to the village to identify the seven accused and called out the names.

Sudaif, the first name on the list called out was not even resident of the village, reported News 18.

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The second name on the list was Ilyas. They were two persons with the same name, however, both of them around 15 years ago had left the village with their families in search of jobs and were settled in the national capital region.

Sarfuddin, 11, and Parvez, 12, were residents of the same village but were not in Bulandshahr.

Khan and Hussain said that they told the police that the two minors had been falsely booked and that they were not even in the village when the alleged slaughter of cows took place.

They were attending a congregation of Tablighi Jamaat, about 45 km away, and provided photographs and videos to the police as proof to back their claim. But the police took them away.

After detaining them for about four hours and getting a photocopy of their Aadhaar card, they were allowed to go on the condition that they would come to the police station whenever called.

A police officer said that two FIRs had been registered — one for cow slaughter and another for rioting.

In the FIR for rioting, 27 persons have been named including leaders of Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad along with 60 unidentified persons.

Inspector Singh, who was an investigation officer in the 2015 Dadri lynching case of Mohammed Akhlaq was shot dead when he tried to reason with the Hindu activists blocking a busy road with carcasses of animals they claimed were of cows.