New Delhi, (IANS) : The mother of missing JNU student Najeeb Ahmed on Sunday requested Delhi Police to adopt fair and impartial means of finding her son and criticised the raid conducted the previous day at her relatives’s houses.
“On 28 January, around 4 a.m., four jeeps of Delhi Police, accompanied by the local police from Badaun in Uttar Pradesh, stormed into the house of Ashraf Qadri, Najeeb’s maternal uncle.
“Around 50 policemen forcefully barged into the house without even knocking on the door, let alone showing a search warrent,” Fatima Nafees, Ahmed’s mother, wrote in her letter to Investigation Officer S.K. Guliya of Delhi Police.
She said that there were young girls aged six and 11 in the house, including other women, and Ahmed’s 80-year-old maternal grandfather, who have not been able to get over the shock of such overbearing manner in which police conducted the raid. The women of the house were also abused by the policemen, she alleged.
Upon entering the house, police officials took photographs of the entire house, inside and outside, and seized mobile phones, pen drives, SIM cards, CPUs, and memory cards from the house.
“Policemen threatened the family members to produce Najeeb if they had hidden him somewhere, held his uncle by his fist and manhandled him during the search operation,” she wrote.
After Qadri, she narrated, police raided the house of his friend Tarruf Shujat and repeated the same drill — gave ominous warnings, took photographs of the house and confiscated the phones and all other other storage devices.
They also ordered both — Qadri and Shujat — to appear before Delhi Police on January 31.
“I am feeling extremely dismayed and distressed about the manner in which police is going about the investigation,” Nafees said accusing the cops of going soft on the nine students alleged to be assaulters of Najeeb, who have been asked to provide alternate address and were not subjected to any scrutiny even after they refused to cooperate.
Expressing her faith in the judicial system of the country, Nafees said: “The court has asked (in a hearing on January 23) the police to seek the consent of nine JNU students who are accused of assaulting Najeeb on the night of October 14. I urge police to pursue this line of inquiry with utmost sincerity and to not spread misinformation in the media or divert attention away from those who are now expected to undergo a lie detector test.”
Earlier, when IANS talked to police on Saturday, it had denied conducting any raid, in its search for Najeeb, at his relatives’ houses.