Mamta with her two children at their hutment at Kotkhai on Friday. Pradeep Kumar
Feeding her two children, Asha (7) and Samir (3), inside her hutment in the desolate corner of a sprawling apple orchard, Mamta (22) says her husband stood for the truth till he was killed by the police in custody. Mamta is the wife of Suraj Singh, the 29-year-old Nepalese national and one of the accused in the rape and murder of a Class X student whose body was found from Halaila forests, a spot barely 500 metres from their hutment. Mamta claims Suraj was killed because he refused to toe the police line to frame innocent persons.
Police have said Suraj was killed by main accused Rajendra Singh alias Raju inside the police station where the two were lodged in a single cell for their interrogation, after they were remanded to police custody. However, Mamta says Raju had been like an elder brother and mentor for her husband. “He (Raju) used to call me sister and pamper my kids. How can he turn a killer, orphan my kids and make me a widow knowing I have no one else to look after me except my husband?” she says.
She furiously dismisses rumours about Suraj having agreed to go to jail to save some “rich culprits” for money.
“Bakwas (nonsense). My husband can beg or borrow, but will never compromise his self-respect. We came here to Kotkhai to earn through labour jobs. During the past five years, we have been living here and no one has raised a finger at him. He was tortured to death by the police for refusing to toe their tutored line. Had he done it, he would have been alive,” she says.
“When I went to see him at the police station, he told me about the torture, the merciless beating and atrocities by drunken policemen,” Mamta says.
Moments later, a police team picked her up from the house and drove to Theog. Shimla SP Soumya Sambavisan, who along with Deputy Commissioner Rohan Chand Thakur had arrived at Kotkhai, said, “She is in our custody. We have decided to give her protection.”
Insiders say the police want to get her statement recorded before a judicial magistrate in Shimla, away from media glare, in view of the revelation she had reportedly made to some reporters the previous day about her husband having been fixed to take the blame for the crime. Suraj was one of the six accused arrested in the case by
the SIT.
Govt submits report to Governor
Kotkhai (Shimla): The Himachal Pradesh government Friday submitted a two-page report to Governor Acharya Devvrat, informing him about the steps taken to deal with the protests and violence, including setting fire to a police station, that broke out following the rape and murder of a schoolgirl.
Shimla Deputy Commissioner Rohan Chand Thakur and new Shimla Superintendent of Police Soumya Sambasivan visited the girl’s family during the day, around two weeks after the incident.
ENS
