Lakhimpur Kheri violence: SIT trying to establish location of accused on fateful day

LUCKNOW: Over a month after the Lakhimpur Kheri violence in which eight persons including four farmers lost their lives, the district police chief Vijay Dhull was transferred late on Thursday night.

Dhull has been attached with the Uttar Pradesh state police headquarters in Lucknow and has been kept on a waiting list. DCP, Lucknow East, Sanjeev Suman, a 2014 batch IPS officer, has replaced Dhull, a 2012 batch IPS officer.

Earlier, on October 28, the UP government had transferred Arvind Kumar Chaurasiya, Lakhimpur Kheri district magistrate under whom the district witnessed the violence on October 3. Chaurasiya was replaced by Mahendra Bahadur Singh as the new DM of the trouble-torn district of the terai.

Besides the administrative reshuffle, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) probing the Lakhimpur Kheri incident is now focusing on establishing the location of the three key accused including Ashish Mishra, Ankit Das and his bodyguard Lateef on the fateful day.

The SIT has turned its focus more on the presence of the three accused at the incident site after the FSL report recently confirmed firing from three licensed firearms including a rifle, a pistol and a repeater gun belonging to Ashish Mishra, Ankit Das and Lateef respectively.

According to highly-placed sources, the investigators were trying to establish the presence of the three key accused at the incident site through their cell phone locations and call details report. All three are currently in jail. However, the hearing in the bail plea of main accused Ashish Mishra would take place on November 15.

Police sources also claimed that during the investigation, the SIT stumbled upon some unclaimed mobile phones from the site and sent them for further examination.

Meanwhile, the FSL report had established the firing from the three weapons in the recent past but it did not clarify the date. At the same time, the autopsy of all the four farmers had shown no gunshot injuries on the bodies. The autopsy report had claimed that all the farmers had died due to trauma, excessive blood loss and brain haemorrhage.

The sources said the ballistic report of one more weapon recovered from another co-accused, Satya Prakash Tripathi, was awaited. The sources also claimed that while Ankit Das and his gunner Latif had accepted in their statements that they fired in the air to escape from the spot when the angry mob attacked them after a fleet of vehicles had ploughed into the crowd of protesting farmers, Ashish Mishra had maintained that he was not present at the violence site but was at a ‘dangal’ in his ancestral village Banbirpur, around 4-5 km away from the site of the incident.

While Ashish Mishra, son of Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Ajay Mishra Teni, was arrested by the SIT on October 9, his accomplices Ankit Das and Latif were taken into custody five days later.

Of the eight who were killed in the October 3 violence, four were farmers, three were BJP workers and one was a local journalist.