The Uttar Pradesh Police on Saturday dismissed allegations that a group of madrassa students who were assaulted in Unnao while playing cricket were targeted for refusing to chant Jai Shri Ram.
This came a day after the Unnao police booked four persons and detained two of them for questioning regarding the incident in which four madrassa boys were left injured.
The police in a statement said a probe of the incident had found that “the issue of raising slogans (Jai Shri Ram) did not come to light.”
Top state officials including additional chief secretary Awanish Awasthi and ADG Law and Order P.V. Ramasastry, who held a hurriedly-called press conference late on Friday, also said that the probe had “confirmed” that “no religious slogans” were raised.
Similar “misleading” incidents had been reported from Kanpur and Aligarh by “distorting facts” in a bid to “spoil the communal atmosphere”, the UP Home Department said in a statement.
Unnao police also said that as per the investigation, statements of the eyewitnesses, CCTV footage and call detail records, the four youths mentioned in the FIR were found to be not present at the site at the time of the incident.
An FIR had been registered against four persons, allegedly right-wing activists, at the Kotwali police station in Unnao on charges of assault, voluntarily causing hurt, intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace and criminal intimidation. While three of the accused were identified -- as Aditya Shukla, Kranti and Kamal -- the fourth remained unidentified.
The police have now identified four other youths and arrested one of them, Sanket Bharti, and now also claimed that the incident was a brawl between the two sides after an argument broke out between the madrassa boys and Golu, a youth who was among those seated on the steps built at the ground.
The police said it is out to arrest the other two youths identified as Dipanshu Chowdhury and Santosh Kumar.
Around 10-12 boys of the madrassa were playing cricket at the GIC grounds in Unnao on Thursday afternoon, their half-day, when four youths approached them and allegedly asked them to chant “Jai Sri Ram”. When the boys refused to chant the slogan, they were slapped and hit with the stumps.
The madrassa boys, all of them minors, were allegedly beaten up with cricket stumps and bats and also attacked with stones, and "almost all of them had their kurtas ripped" by the miscreants, said Naeem Miswahi, the imam of the madrassa.
