Angered by police complaint, duo attempts to set neighbour’s house ablaze

Two individuals in Mumbai allegedly attempted to burn down their neighbor's house in retaliation for a police complaint. They now face charges of arson.

Mumbai: Two individuals from a Powai chawl allegedly attempted to burn down their neighbour’s house in the early hours of Monday, reportedly in retaliation for the neighbour filing a police complaint against them. The accused duo now faces charges of arson as the police investigate the incident.

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Sundar Ansari, a 33-year-old resident of Gautam Nagar in Powai, had previously complained to the police, accusing his neighbours, Bhakad and Pawan, of assaulting him on Sunday night. The altercation stemmed from Ansari returning home inebriated and causing a disturbance, leading to a physical confrontation with the two younger men.

Recounting the events of the previous night, Ansari said, “I had gone home drunk a little after midnight on Sunday. I fought with my wife after which her brother who lives in the room next to ours came to intervene.” The family got into a violent argument.

The two accused, along with another neighbour, had gone to the complainant’s home. “They helped his wife to force feed him some lemon juice during which he may have felt the two men assaulted him. He had made a complaint that we filed as a non-cognisable offence and spoke to the men he had accused,” said an official from Powai police.

The next day, the two young men confronted him about the complaint, and Ansari told the police. “When I came back home on Sunday evening, I saw that the door of his house was broken, that other neighbours said they saw the two accused doing it,” he said in his statement to the police.

Ansari said the two men also threatened him over the phone about the consequences of the police complaint against them. “Around 2 am on Monday, when the entire family was asleep, they were woken up by heat and smoke. The door of their house was on fire as was the curtain outside the house of the brother-in-law’s house,” the officer said. He added that, fortunately, the family got up in time to douse the fire before any untoward incident could take place.

The accused now face charges under sections 436 (mischief by fire with the intention of destroying property), 504 (intentionally insults, and thereby gives provocation to any person, intending or knowing it to be likely that such provocation will cause him to break the public peace), and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code.