By TwoCircles.net news desk
Hyderabad: Full one week and 29 Muslim women, some of them minor, were released today. Some of them were arrested with their kids in the lap by the police when they were protesting the arrest of a Muslim youth.
This all happened on 5th March when some persons with their face covered, presumably policemen, took away Motasim Billah, son of Maulana Abdul Aleem Islahi, from outside his residence in Saidabad locality of the city. Soon after the incident, about 100 women of the neighbourhood led by Motasim’s mother rushed to the nearby police station to lodge a complaint. They did so because they feared for his life.
Their fear is not unfounded. The history is replete with instances when Muslim youths were picked up and later falsely implicated in cases. Motasim is the brother of Mujahid Saleem who was fired at point blank range and killed by the Gujarat police. Motasim, a civil engineering student, is described in the police document as an “inter-state Islamic fundamentalist activist … in Hyderabad to target vital installations.”
Condemning the arrest of Muslim women, Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee (APCLMC) general secretary, Lateef Mohammed Khan, said instead of giving a patient hearing to those women, the police officers used filthy language calling them, prostitutes. He alleged the police wanted to instigate violence and distracted the attention of the media from the act of kidnapping Motasim by vilifying the women and projecting them as supporters of Jehadists.
APCLMC described the arrest of women as an act of revenge against those women who had deposed against the police before the National Minorities Commission, State Human Rights Commission and various other bodies in connection with earlier police atrocities.
Addressing a press conference in the city, Khan said it was a conspiracy of the police to humiliate the Muslim women and provoke the community by calling them prostitutes.