After a man in his 20s committed suicide in Uttar Pradesh’s Baghpat district, hours after a scuffle with authorities at a Covid vaccination centre on Monday, ten police officers were dismissed from duty.
An “abetment to suicide” charge has been filed against five of the ten officers. Last night, the man’s body was discovered hanging from a tree near his town.
His relatives have alleged he was driven to suicide by the policemen who assaulted him “for no reason” at a vaccination centre in the western UP district, and then later came to his home, where his mother was also beaten.
A 90-second video shot on a mobile phone at the vaccination centre in Baghpat on Monday afternoon has been widely shared on social media. It shows at least two policemen trying to grab the man. A second person who tries to intervene is pushed away by the cops.
After a struggle, the man who later died by suicide manages to escape from the centre.
In his police complaint, his father alleged the argument started when the policemen did not let his son enter the vaccination centre despite his name being called out by the medical staff on duty.
“The police pushed my son around and, when he asked them why, they started beating him. He was then dragged to a room where he was assaulted with lathis. We managed to get him away from there but later in the evening, many police came to my village home and even assaulted my wife. My son got very scared and ran away. We found his body later,” the father said.
“We have filed a case and have removed 10 police personnel from duty. The body has been sent for postmortem and we will not spare anyone,” Baghpat’s police chief, Abhishek Singh, said in a video statement.
