“It was a bullet of the Ramgarh police that killed 35-year-old Umar Mohammed during a joint operation with the cow vigilantes on Friday," alleged People’s Union For Civil Liberties in Rajasthan.
The 35-year-old man’s body was found on railway tracks in Rajasthan’s Alwar and relatives have alleged that he was shot dead and dumped on the tracks for transporting cattle.
A vandalized van with five cows was found about 15 km away on the same day. However, the police are refusing to look at the two incidents together and said they were two different cases — the death of man on tracks and damaged pickup truck.
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“PUCL condemns the ghastly murder of Umar Mohammed by the Ramgarh thana (Alwar) police and Gau Rakshaks at Ghatmatika Pahadi near Bharatpur,” said a joint letter signed by the PUCL president Kavita Srivastava and four others.
Maulana Haneef, a social worker, told Hindustan Times that the body belonged to Umar Mohammed, a dairy farmer who along with Tahir Khan and Jabba were taking their pet cows to Ghat Mika village from Bharatpur on Friday night when some people opened fire on them near Govindgarh, killing Mohammad on the spot.
Tahir Khan suffered a bullet wound and was taken to a hospital in Ferozepur in Haryana while Jabba was not traceable, he told the paper.
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Anil Beniwal, assistant SP, Alwar (south), told Hindustan Times the whole incident was being wrongly presented by combining two different incidents: “We have found one body in Ramgarh on Railway tracks while police has found five cows and one dead cow in a pickup near Govindgarh.”
Police said it was so mangled that they could not confirm whether it had bullet injuries.
ASP Beniwal said efforts are being made to identify the deceased and the body would be sent to Jaipur for post mortem, only after which it would be confirmed whether the body “sustained bullet injuries”.
In April, Pehlu Khan, 55, and four others were attacked allegedly by the cow vigilantes in Alwar's Behror while they were on their way to Haryana after purchasing cattle in Rajasthan's Ramgarh on April 1. Khan succumbed to his injuries at a hospital.
The Rajasthan police purposely tried to 'weaken' the investigation into the murder of dairy farmer Pehlu Khan allegedly by cow vigilantes in April this year by delaying filing of FIR and invoking lenient IPC sections, an independent fact-finding team has observed.
Activists and lawyers released a report titled "How the police are protecting the murderers of Pehlu Khan" and "sabotaging" the case against so-called "gau-rakshaks". The report also alleged that there has been "medical manipulation" in the case.
The Supreme Court in September directed all state governments to appoint a senior police officer as a nodal officer in each district to ensure that incidents of cow vigilantism are prevented and dealt with effectively.
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A bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra also directed the chief secretaries of every state government to file a status report giving details of the actions taken to prevent incidents of cow vigilantism.
