GURUGRAM: Hundreds of villagers from Sihri-Singalhedi organised a mahapanchayat in Mewat’s Punhana area on Thursday and protested the arrest of a man accused of supplying weapons to a youth who shot dead a BCom student outside her college in Ballabhgarh last week.
Faridabad police have picked up Azaruddin on the suspicion that he supplied the gun to Touseef, the cousin of Congress’s Nuh MLA Aftab Ahmed, who shot dead Nikita Tomar after she rejected his marriage proposal.
The protesters claimed on Thursday that Azaruddin was innocent and the cops had arrested him to shield some of the other accused, who have links with a political family of Mewat. Both Touseef and Rehan, who was with him during the shooting, have been arrested.
The villagers said Azaruddin, a father of six, was a daily wager and the only earning member of his family. He did not have any criminal record, they claimed.
Azaruddin’s wife Shabnam said they were being targeted because they were poor and did not have any voice to protest. “I urge the government to conduct a fair investigation into the case and arrest the remaining culprits, who are roaming free,” she added.
According to Azaruddin’s mother Aruni, her son had come in contact with Islamuddin Zuber, Touseef’s maternal uncle. Zuber, she said, is the son-in-law of a former MLA and has criminal record. “Police did not visit our home, Zuber took my son and handed him over to the cops to save himself,” Aruni alleged. She claimed that Zuber was hand-in-glove with Touseef in the murder case.
Tahir, a relative of Azaruddin, also alleged that the police were trying to protect Zuber because of his political connections. “Even if we believe what the cops are saying, that Azaruddin supplied the weapons, the question is where did he get the weapons and who asked him to supply them?” asked Tahir.
Ram Hari, another villager, said they had been making rounds of the police station for the past week, but had not managed to get Azaruddin released. “We came to know that the police have framed him in a false case. So, we conducted a mahapanchayat to urge the government to conduct a fair probe,” he added.
The October 26 murder of Nikita had triggered protests in Faridabad and a political row in Haryana after it emerged that the shooter was MLA Ahmed’s cousin. Faridabad police are supposed to file a chargesheet in the case on Friday. Running into 600 pages, the chargesheet has listed around 60 witnesses in the case. Senior officers of Faridabad police did not respond to calls or messages regarding the allegations that they were trying to protect some of the accused.