Image Courtesy: 9curry.com
The socio-political scene in Uttar Pradesh keeps getting murkier every day as the state recuperates from the police violence and havoc unleashed during and after anti-CAA protests. NDTV attempted to do a verification of the claims made by the UP police regarding its policemen sustaining bullet injuries during the violence. This claim was made by UP police to counter the claim made by people that over 20 people have died due to police action in Uttar Pradesh.
NDTV reported that UP police had claimed that 57 of its cops had sustained bullet injuries and 300 got injured but did not reveal names of the injured officers after having asked for it.
One of the few policemen NDTV managed to trace was Muzaffarnagar Superintendent of Police Satpal Antil. When approached, he showed a photograph of what appears to be a bullet wound. “I was with my team at Meenakshi Chowk on December 20 when I was hit. I couldn’t understand what happened at the time, only that I was bleeding a lot,” he said. It was reported that barring this one incident, attempts to get details of policemen with bullet injuries seemed challenging.
When NDTV asked PV Rama Sastry, a top police officer in UP for details he suggested that such information be taken from district level officers and when district level officers were approached, they only provided the number of those injured and no names.
NDTV, however, managed to find officials injured due to stone pelting which included a transport official in Muzaffarnagar and a sub Inspector in Kanpur who was hit on the head with a stone. It was reported that to counter videos showing cops firing at protesters, the Uttar Pradesh police released a series of photographs and videos showing two men – one of them wearing a blue jacket – firing at them in Meerut late last month. Deputy Chief Minister Dinesh Sharma also claimed that police have recovered over 500 cartridges of prohibited bores from places where violence broke out.
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