Five months after Pehlu Khan was lynched in Rajasthan’s Alwar, the state police decided to close the investigation against six people that were named by Khan in his statement before he died in April, Hindustan Times reported on 14 September.
Khan’s son Irshad now wants the Supreme Court to order a order a fresh probe into his father’s killing and shift the case out of Rajasthan.
Irshad said he has no faith in the CID and the Crime Branch of Rajasthan Police.
He told HT that the family is being threatened regularly. “We are living in a miserable situation. The local Police are not helping us,” he said.
The six accused were given a clean chit based on statements given by staff members of a cow shelter as well as some telephonic records, the HT report said, quoting from an investigation report.
According to the report, the staff members of Rath Gaushala, a cow shelter, have said that the six men – 45-year-olds Om Yadav and Sudhir Yadav, 44-year-old Hukum Chand Yadav, 73-year-old Jagmal Yadav, 48-year-old Naveen Sharma, and 24-year-old Rahul Saini – were present in the shelter. This is significant because the gaushala is located about four kilometres from the site where Khan was lynched.
The investigation against nine other people in the case, however, will continue. Seven of the nine people have been arrested while two of them are on the loose.
“The statements of witnesses in the case, including policemen and the employees of the Rath Gaushala, indicate that none of the accused were present at the time of the attack. Call record details of the six people, along with Base Transceiver Station (BTS) location of mobiles, further support this,” Hindustan Times quoted the investigation report.
The Crime Investigation Department-Crime Branch Department that was investigating the case had on 1 September asked the Alwar police to remove the names of the six men from the list of the accused. Subsequently, a reward on finding information on them was also cancelled.
Irshad, told the media in his village Jaisinghpur, 15 km from Nuh town, that they will ensure that those behind his murder get punished.
These six accused were the main people who stopped our vehicle and started beating us up. They were joined by 15-20 others. We tried to show them papers that we were dairy farmers, who were bringing the cows for dairy farming from a government fair (mela), but they tore up the papers and attacked us.Irshad Khan
One 1 April 2017, Pehlu Khan had left home with his sons to buy cows from the Jaipur Cattle Fair. On his way back, he was attacked by some cow vigilantes. He succumbed to injuries a few days later.
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