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AGRA: As many as twelve police personnel, including three sub-inspectors, were booked on January 22 for the ‘murder’ (section 302, Indian Penal Code-IPC) of 42-year-old farmer Zeeshan Haider, earlier accused of “cow slaughter”. This was following an order of the court of the chief judicial magistrate in Saharanpur, on a petition filed by Haider’s wife Afroz Begum, ordering the Deoband SHO to “register a case under relevant sections and provide a copy of it to the court within 24 hours” reported The Times of India.

The incident dates back to September 2021 when Haider’s wife had alleged that the local police had simply picked up her husband from their house and killed him.

The police in a contradictory version, had stated that following a “tip-off” of cow slaughter, they raided an area in a forest where Haider and a few others were found with “country made pistols”. “They fired at the police team and Haider was struck by a bullet from one of their weapons. He was taken to a hospital where he succumbed,” cops had claimed. Meanwhile, the cops’ version was persistently and strongly contested by Haider’s family.

“My husband had 40 bigha land and two licenced weapons. Why should he keep an illegal weapon?” his wife said. She approached the local court in November 2021. The Allahabad high court had only recently directed the lower court to “dispose of the case soon”. Haider was a resident of Thitki village under Deoband police limits. SHO (Deoband), Hirday Narayan Singh, said, “Following the court order, a case under IPC section 302 (murder) has been registered. A probe is being conducted.”

Janisar Ahmed, the lawyer representing Haider’s family, said, “In his judgment, the judge had observed that ‘it’s surprising that even after being arrested by police, there was an illegal weapon in the possession of the accused farmer for a long time. And the bullet was fired from that weapon itself. When the accused men were together and the police team was in another direction, then the fact that the accused shot each other with their weapons seems laughable’.”

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