In yet another incident of a mob lynching, a Muslim man named Firoz Qureshi was brutally beaten to death over allegations of theft in Uttar Pradesh’s Shamli District on Friday, July 5.
The incident occurred when Firoz had gone to the Jalalabad area of Ganga Aryanagar for work and was accused of being a thief by the mob, allegedly led by Pinky and Pankaj Rajendra.
Despite some locals’ efforts to save him, Firoz succumbed to his injuries. “He went out today, at around 5 p.m. He was beaten by a mob and was injured badly. Later, he succumbed to his injuries,” Firoz’s bother Afza quoted by The Observer Post.
“Firoz was a scrap worker with no criminal record. He was a family man with three children. He wasn’t a thief. He didn’t have any cases against him. He was a family man. We can’t understand why he was killed,” added Afzal.
The family members of the victim then approached a local police station and filed a report.
Responding to the complaint, the police stated that a First Information Report (FIR) had been registered. However, no arrest has been made so far.
The police registered a case under a section of culpable homicide (BNS-105) against the accused, but the lynching section of BND was not invoked.
According to reports, the police claimed that the mob did not have the intention to kill Firoz, they were only beating him because they had “mistaken” him for a thief.
Subsequently, the family members and local Muslim residents of Jalalabad thronged to the police station with the dead body of Firoz demanding that the police register a murder case against Pinky, Pankaj, Rajendra and their associates.
“Please get his post-mortem done and take the strictest action against the culprits,” Afzal said.
The Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) party’s Thana Bhawan MLA, Ashraf Ali Khan, also attended Firoz’s funeral and reportedly had a conversation with the police in the lynching case.
This incident comes just a month after a 35-year-old Muslim man named Mohammed Farid, alias Aurangzeb was lynched to death by a Hindutva mob on suspicion of being a thief in Aligarh’s Mama Bhanja locality on June 18.
In this case, too, the police initially registered a case under a section of culpable homicide instead of murder, drawing criticism from the victim’s family and political parties.
Shockingly, the deceased along with eight other people were later booked on dacoity charges following a complaint by the mother of an accused in the lynching case.
The back-to-back incidents of mob lynching targeting Muslims on mere suspicion of the thief have once again highlighted the growing problem of communal violence and lack of justice for minority victims in the BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh.
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