In an abduction case, a youth was summoned to Kasganj police station for questioning, but he died in detention, according to his relatives, who allege that he was slain by police officers. According to the police, Altaf, 22, strangled himself in the police lock-washroom up’s with a thread from his jacket hood, and five officers have been suspended for incompetence as a result of the event on Tuesday.
The opposition Samajwadi Party slammed the Yogi Adityanath government for “yet another custody death,” claiming that under the BJP’s leadership, criminals and police are engaging in a “encounter” of law and order in the state.
Narrating the sequence of events, Superintendent of Police, Kasganj, Rohan Pramod Botre said on Wednesday, “One Altaf (of Nagla Syed locality) was called for questioning in Kasganj police station in a case related to IPC section 363 (kidnapping) and 366 (kidnapping, abducting or inducing a woman to compel her marriage) on Tuesday morning.
“During interrogation, he requested the policemen to go to the washroom and was allowed to use the washroom inside the lockup. “He was wearing a black colour jacket. He tried to strangulate himself with a string on the (jacket) hood that he tied to the tap of the toilet. When he did not return for some time, the policemen went inside and found him unconscious. He was rushed to the community health centre, Ashok Nagar in Kasganj, where he died,” the SP said. Postmortem of the victim is being conducted, he said.
“The lax policemen will be punished. We have suspended five policemen in this connection,” he said. The victim’s kin, however, alleged that he was killed by the policemen.
The Samajwadi Party took to Twitter to attack the Yogi Adityanath government, calling the incident another misdeed of UP’s “thoko (trigger-happy) police”. “In UP, under the patronage of the chief minister, criminal and police are committing an encounter of law and order. The guilty policemen should face a murder case and must be punished,” Samajwadi Party said in a tweet in Hindi.
The incident comes close on the heels of a sanitation worker, who was accused of stealing Rs 25 lakh from Jagdishpura police station in Agra, dying in police custody after his health deteriorated during interrogation.
