By TwoCircles.net staff reporter
Lucknow : As many as 350 Muslim families, whose near and dear ones were brutally killed by PAC forces at point blank range in the Hashimpura and Maliana riots on May 22 and 23, 1987, are all set to file petitions before the Right to Information Commissioner here. Under Right to Information Act 2006, they want to know where the 63 PAC jawans including Commandant Tripathi of Battalion 42 (who had carried the PAC action) are deployed at present, how many times they have been promoted during the last 20 years since the riots, and what departmental actions were taken against these erring police officials for committing the massacre. Their petitions are likely to spill the beans as soon as they are filed and action is taken on them.
Listen to this interview with their lawyer Vrinda Grover:
These petitions have been drafted by lawyers at the behest of former councillor of Meerut and the moving spirit behind the formation of Hashimpura Legal Advisory Committee Maulana Muhammad Yameen, who are leading the petitioners.
The erring police officials detained the fateful Muslims from their houses, made them stand in a queue and shot at them one by one. They then loaded their dead bodies in a police van and threw them in the Upper Ganga and Hindon rivers at Ghaziabad, perhaps thinking that no one would come to know about the carnage. But the corpses were discovered and despite their lame excuses the PAC jawans were held responsible by investigating agencies that recommended action against them.
The Mulayam Singh Yadav administration should have filed criminal cases against all 63 erring police officials, as per recommendations of the investigating agencies. But it chose to move against only 19 police officials, and that too after Muslims had already started legal battle against the PAC.
On the one hand Mulayam claimed to be the Messiah of Muslims by allowing legal actions against 19 PAC jawans while on the other “secretly� granted promotion to the rest 44 PAC jawans including Tripathi. None of them was either suspended or subjected to departmental action.
The criminal case against 19 PAC jawans is pending before the Tis Hazari Court New Delhi. Several witnesses have given evidences of the massacre before the court.