Vadodara: ‘Will fight till last breath to get justice for my father’

VADODARA: “They could have thrown my father on the road, at least we could have buried him with dignity.” These are the words of Sheikh Salim, son of 62-year-old Sheikh Babu Nishar who was allegedly tortured to death by six cops of Fatehgunj police station in December last year.
Salim, who is extremely pained with the situation, is ready to fight tooth and nail for justice.
“I will fight till the Supreme Court if need be, but I have the right to know the truth and get justice,” said Salim, a native of Hyderabad who used to regularly shuttle between Ahmedabad and Hyderabad before lockdown.
Salim has a provision store in Ahmedabad’s Shah-e-Alam area and often commutes to Hyderabad where the family has another house.
He said if Vadodara police would have acted when he first approached them with a missing person complaint in January, he would have been spared the tyranny of fighting for over six months.
“I was fed up of meeting police officials including the police commissioner and requesting them to trace my father. But things only moved when I went to the high court,” said Salim.
“When the high court sent notice and asked for their response, there was development in investigation otherwise all these months they were only trying to put a lid over the entire issue,” he added.
“The FIR was registered only after the high court’s intervention, but the culprits have not been arrested yet. Had it been a case involving a common person, the arrests would have been made by now,” he told TOI.
Salim also pointed out that when he went to Sayajigunj police station on January 17 he had learnt from a hearsay that his father had been tortured to death at Fatehgunj police station.
“I went to Fatehgunj police station four times to find out the truth and saw the station diary entry made about my father, but there was no CCTV footage,” he said. It was only after that, that he gave a missing person complaint which was registered at Sayajigunj police station on January 31.