A 25-year-old Muslim lawyer from Rajasthan’s Kota district has accused the Uttar Pradesh police of falsely implicating him in a case of an anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act protest and torturing him in their custody. The lawyer, Mohammed Faisal, spent 14 days in jail at Kairana in U.P. before he was released on bail on January 7.
Mr. Faisal, an advocate in Kota district courts, had gone to Kairana in Shamli district last month as a member of the National Confederation of Human Rights Organisations to offer legal aid to the protesters arrested during the agitation against the CAA. The police arrested him from the court premises when he was completing formalities for bail applications of some accused persons.
Mr. Faisal said at a press conference here on Monday that a team of U.P. Police’s Special Operations Group forcibly took him, along with three others, to Kotwali police station in Kairana on December 23. “I was outside the SDM court with a local lawyer doing the paper work for bail applications for some persons who were picked up from their houses five days ago,” he said.
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When Mr. Faisal told the policemen that he was a lawyer and showed them his identity card, they dismissed it as fake and claimed that he had come to Kairana to “incite violence”. “They said I was speaking with a Bengali accent and alleged that I had come from West Bengal to provoke the people and help the rioters.”
The lawyer alleged that the policemen abused him, thrashed him, beat him with sticks and tortured him by giving electric current on his back inside the police station. The police then put him in the lock-up and arrested him in a criminal case.