Four members of Hindutva group All India Hindu Mahasabha were arrested on Wednesday for falsely implicating four Muslims in a cow slaughter case in Agra during Ram Navami festivities, reported The Hindu.
The four members – Sanjay Jat, Jitendra Kushwaha, Brajesh Bhadoria and Saurabh Sharma – had filed a fake complaint to settle a rivalry, the police said.
They have been booked under Section 429 (mischief by killing or maiming cattle), 120B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code and sections of the Uttar Pradesh Prevention of Cow Slaughter Act, according to The Times of India.
Based on their complaint, a first information report was registered against four Muslims – Mohammad Rizwan, Mohammad Nakim and Mohammad Shanu and Imran Qureshi – for slaughtering a cow. However, police investigation later revealed that the four men had nothing to do with the incident.
“Jitendra [Kushwaha] was found to have lied to us during the interrogation,” Additional Commissioner of Police RK Singh had said. “He, Sanjay [Jat] and a few others were near the spot of the cow slaughter, call records suggest, not those they named in the police complaint. Call records also show that the accused persons had not gone to that spot in over a month.”
On Wednesday, the police said they found that five other Muslim men had colluded with the four members of the Hindutva group. Two of them have been identified as Imran Qureshi and Shanu, according to the Hindustan Times.
The police had arrested Quereshi and Shanu on April 6, who admitted to the conspiracy against the four Muslim men.
“So far, seven people have been arrested in the case,” Singh said. “One of them surrendered himself.”
All India Hindu Mahasabha state unit president Rishi Trivedi claimed that his group members were being falsely implicated.
“They had informed the police about cow slaughtering and reached the spot before them,” Trivedi claimed. “Now, police have booked them in the case. It appears to be part of a conspiracy.”
He said that Jat and others were planning to go to Lucknow on Thursday to hold a press conference about the case but were arrested a day before.
Jat is currently out on bail in an alleged extortion case. He and his supporters often stopped people driving vehicles carrying beef and extorted money from them by threatening to file police cases.
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