Hathras: A man who was granted bail in 2018 after being accused of sexual assault, allegedly shot dead the survivor’s father on Monday in a village in Uttar Pradesh’s Hathras district, about 200 km from Delhi.
The accused has been identified as Gaurav Sharma. According to the police, he was jailed briefly in 2018 in connection with a molestation case. The girl’s father had filed a case against Gaurav.
Gaurav was, however, granted bail by a local court within a month of his arrest.
“The man who died had filed a case against Gaurav Sharma in July 2018 for molestation. The accused went to jail and got bail after a month. Since then, both families were hostile to each other. The wife and aunt of the main accused had gone to a village temple to pray where both daughters of this man were present. The women had an argument. The accused – Gaurav Sharma – and the woman’s father intervened and the argument between the men intensified. After this, Gaurav flew into a rage and called some boys from his family to the scene and shot at the man,” Hathras Police chief Vineet Jaiswal said in a video statement released on Twitter.
A family member of Gaurav Sharma, has so far been arrested in the case. Asking officials to take strict action in the case, Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has given directions to officials to invoke the tough National Security Act against all the accused involved in the case, news agency ANI reported.
Videos shot by local journalists on Monday showed the survivor crying outside a police station and demanding justice.
“Please give me justice… please give me justice. First, he molested me and now he has shot my father. He had come to our village. There were six-seven people. My father had no enmity against anyone. His name is Gaurav Sharma (referring to the accused),” she is heard saying.
This is not the first time that a gruesome incident like this took place in Hathras. In September last year, a 20-year-old Dalit woman was raped by four men from the upper caste community in Hathras in an incident that had shocked the entire nation.
She later succumbed to her injuries and breathed her last in a hospital in Delhi.
The Police were highly criticized over the handling of the case and for conducting a late-night funeral of the victim where the family said they were not allowed.