Bihar Katihar Superintendent of Police, Jitendra Kumar, on Friday informed that the two deaths during a protest were not caused by police firing. Officials claimed that bullets shot by an “unidentified” person killed two people during the protests.
Two persons were killed and several others injured as police opened fire on Friday in Bihar’s Katihar district following stone-pelting by protesters who were demanding better power supply on 26 July, Wednesday.
According to the police headquarters in Patna, “more than a dozen police personnel and power department employees” sustained injuries in the incident that took place barely “100 meters away from Barsoi police station”.
“Nearly 1,000 local residents were staging a demonstration in front of the power department office. Some anti-social elements had found their way into the crowd and they started hurling stones. When a police party tried to quell the disruptors, they too were attacked with bricks, stones and sticks,” said the PHQ, which also shared photos of injured policemen.
“Today, we came here (incident spot) for an inquiry. Whatever we do will be fact-based. We checked the CCTV camera…We first went where the body was recovered and found that it is impossible for the bullet fired by the police to have hit the deceased given the distance. It is visible in the CCTV that a youth comes and opens fire at the two deceased…” Kumar told reporters on Friday.
District Magistrate Ravi Prakash and Superintendent of Police Jitendra Kumar made the claim while sharing with the press a CCTV footage of the incident that took place on Wednesday.
“It is a planned conspiracy. We had been smelling a rat since the police had fired its shots from a place too far to have hit any of the protesters,” claimed the SP.
Two persons had died while several others, including many police personnel and power department officials, were injured in the district’s Barsoi area where a demonstration demanding better electricity supply turned violent.
The officials claimed that the CCTV footage showed a gun-toting man “coming from the direction where the first death took place. He can be then seen shooting at and injuring two other bystanders, one of whom died later”.
Notably, while Khurshid Alam had died on the spot, Sonu Kumar Sahu succumbed to injuries at a hospital a few hours later. Another person, Neyaz Alam, is undergoing treatment at a hospital in Siliguri in West Bengal for his bullet injury.
The officials said an FIR has been lodged, both against named and unidentified persons, though they did not disclose the identities of the accused.
They, however, asserted that all the accused will be brought to book soon.
(With agency inputs)
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Updated: 28 Jul 2023, 07:35 PM IST
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