Three days after a Muslim man was murdered here, allegedly by members of fringe right-wing group the Hindu Rashtra Sena (HRS), the police are probing if the outfit attacked others.
The statement by the chief witness, Amin Shaikh, cited by the police, that he too was attacked like Mohsin Shaikh prompted the police to look into this angle. “A group of 20 people came towards me. They were shouting that no Muslims should be spared. I was alone, and scared. Even as I ran inside a shop, they chased me. They attacked me with hockey sticks,” Amin told The Hindu . “I pretended to collapse. Maybe they thought I had died.”
“We are in the process of investigating whether it was the HRS members who attacked Amin as well,” DCP Manoj Patil said.
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The incident was a fallout of the emergence ofmorphed photographs of Maratha king Shivaji and the late Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray on Facebook last week. The situation in Pune worsened when a rumour that Muslims had stoned Shivaji statue spread on mobile messaging platform Whatsapp, prompting the HRS to take to the streets, the police stated.
Meanwhile, Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan has approved ex gratia of Rs. 5 lakh for the victim’s family to be disbursed from the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund.