A 23-year-old youth slated to get married on May 3 has been hospitalised for kidney complications, after he was brutally tortured by the police near his residence at DJ Halli in Bengaluru on the night of April 10.
The victim, Mohammed Tanveer, was spat on, abused for his faith and savagely thrashed by several policemen inside DJ Halli police station over trivial reasons. The incident came to light after his brother Mohammed Musaveer filed a complaint against the police officers with Bengaluru Police Commissioner T Suneel Kumar on Saturday.
According to Musaveer, on the night of April 10, Tanveer and his friend Danish went out to buy medicines for their father. On the way to the pharmacy, Tanveer’s mother called him, asking him to buy some more medicines. As he picked up the call while driving his bike, he was stopped by a police constable. “The police man Ayyappa saw my brother talking over the phone, caught him, and asked him to cut the call,” Musaveer told The Cognate. “Tanveer took a couple of seconds to disconnect the call, which infuriated Ayappa and he assaulted Tanveer with a baton”.
Musaveer said that the flogging was so severe that the baton broken into two pieces. “When my brother asked the policeman what authority he has to assault him for no reason, Ayyappa summoned a patrol vehicle and pushed him and his friend inside it. The policemen who were inside the van beat him on his legs continuously till they reached the station,” Musaveer said.
Constable Ayyappa allegedly dragged Tanveer out of the car and into the police station whilst beating him. Musaveer said that the police removed Tanveer’s clothes and took turns to beat him up. They hit him on his shoulders, knees, buttocks and on the legs, till he lost consciousness. Tanveer was beaten up continuously till early morning by eight constables.
When their distraught father reached the police station in the morning, Musaveer said that constable Ayyappa banged Tanveer’s head to the metal rods of the jail door multiple times and spat on him. Ayyappa even called the other constables and made them spit on Tanveer while their father watched. “My father kept begging them to let Tanveer go. The police booked a petty case against my brother and released him only after writing ‘I will never talk back to the police’ 1000 times in Kannada. They even made Danish slap my brother and took his signatures on blank white papers.”
However, it was after two days, when Tanveer complained of severe pains and was unable to get up from his bed, that his mother noticed that his urine was red in colour. The family rushed him to a hospital, where the doctors informed them that his kidneys had been damaged.
ACP Seemanth Kumar Singh confirmed to the media that the probe revealed that DJ Halli police had indeed assaulted Tanveer. And after intense protests from Muslim organisations like Social Democratic Party of India (SDPI), Sub-inspector Santosh and constable Ayyappa, and one another cop have been suspended, and a case under IPC sections 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means), 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace) and 149 (every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object) has been registered them.
However, Musaveer told The Cognate that the sections under which the cops are booked are of lighter nature, and demanded that sections like 326 of CRPC and other suitable sections be registered against them. He also demanded that Tanveer be given a government job along with suitable compensation for the torture he was subjected to.
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Shaik Zakeer Hussain is the Founder and Editor of The Cognate.
