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Police release footage of Dec 15 violence at AMU, say students started it
The 10-minute footage shows students forcing open the Bab-e-Syed Gate of AMU, says police officials.
Police in Uttar Pradesh’s Aligarh on Tuesday released a video of what they said counters allegations they used force against students of Aligarh Muslim University on December 15, when violence broke out on the campus during protests against the citizenship act.
The 10-minute footage from a closed-circuit television or CCTV camera released by the police shows students breaking the Bab-e-Syed Gate at AMU and pelting the force with stones late on December 15.
Officials claimed that the CCTV footage negates accusations that the police barged into the AMU campus after breaking the gates and used force against students.
“The CCTV footage clearly shows that students were bent upon creating ruckus while it were the police who made maximum efforts to prevent breakage of Bab-e-Syed Gate,” said a senior police official.
Clashes in AMU had erupted following police action against demonstrators in the vicinity of Jamia Milia Islamia in New Delhi, when some of the agitators got inside the campus, prompting the security personnel to also enter the varsity.
A five-hour-long clash followed between the students and the police – a confrontation that involved stone-pelting and alleged firing by agitators, and a lathi-charge and the use of water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets by the police, which also barged into the campus’s hostels and guest houses in search of protesters.
Multiple accounts say between 95 and 125 students, some local residents, policemen, and teachers were injured. The students alleged that they were “hunted down” and “beaten with a vengeance”. They also alleged police brutality and torture after they were detained.
Police have denied all charges.
Internet and text services were suspended in the entire Aligarh district after the clashes. Authorities closed AMU prematurely for “winter vacations” and asked students to leave the hostels.
“With such video footage made public, police cannot justify the excess they committed while entering the hostel rooms and burning the belongings of students staying in hostel rooms,” alleged Hamza Sufiyan, former vice-president of AMU students’ union.
Students have vacated the hostels but the AMU campus is still witnessing protests, mainly by women students at the Bab-e-Syed Gate beside protest march by teaching and non-teaching staff against Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
The student protests in AMU over CAA had first started on December 11 and were mostly peaceful.
