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Beef row: Kashmiri students assaulted journalist, say police
A few Kashmiri students allegedly assaulted a journalist who went to Mewar University hostel to enquire into rumours that students were cooking beef in their room on Monday night
A few Kashmiri students allegedly assaulted a local journalist who went to Mewar University in Rajasthan’s Chittorgarh district, following rumours that four undergraduates from the northernmost state had cooked beef in their hostel room on Monday night.
Police have registered a case of voluntarily causing hurt and wrongful restraint against unidentified Kashmiri students on the basis of a complaint lodged by the journalist.
Chittorgarh superintendent of police Prasann Khamesara said reports about Kashmiri students being beaten up were false. “In fact, a few of them assaulted Manish Porwal, a Rajasthan Patrika reporter, when he went to the hostel to inquire about the beef rumour on Monday night. We have registered a case against unidentified Kashmiri students and are trying to identify them,” he told HT.
Police have registered a case (FIR No. 75/16) at Gangrar police station of the district under sections 323 (punishment for voluntarily causing hurt), 341 (punishment for wrongful restraint), 327 (voluntarily causing hurt to extort property or constrain to an illegal act) and 379 (punishment for theft) of the Indian Penal Code.
Rumours arose on Monday night that four accused undergraduate students — Shakib Ashraf, Hilal Farukh, Mohammad Makbool and Shaukat Ali — were cooking beef in their hostel room. A large number of angry local residents assembled at the university gate, but police managed to assuage their tempers. However, in order to prevent the commission of a cognisable offence, the four Kashmiri students — all between 21 and 27 years of age — were taken into preventive custody under Section 151 of the IPC (disturbing the peace) on Tuesday.
Read: No beef found in Mewar University hostel, Kashmiri students get bail
“When we summoned the students to the police station to find where they had purchased the meat from, they refused to cooperate and — instead — began behaving aggressively. So we took them into preventive custody,” Khamesara said.
After a board of experts confirmed that the meat in question was not beef, the Gangrar sub-division magistrate’s court released the four on a bail bond of Rs 25,000 on Wednesday.
Earlier, Jammu and Kashmir director general of police K Rajendra Kumar called up his counterpart in Rajasthan, Manoj Bhatt, to enquire about the incident. “He wanted to know if the students from his state were assaulted in any way. I told him that they were not hurt, and that we had prevented a clash between them and the local residents who assembled outside the campus,” Bhatt said.
