A day after the murder of a journalist in Sitapur, the police on Sunday took eight people, including four lekhpals, into custody for interrogation based on the suspicion raised by the family members of the deceased.
The development came on a day of protests, allegations and visits by politicians to the residence of Raghvendra Bajpai, 36, the journalist with a national Hindi daily and Right to Information (RTI) activist.
Lekhpal Sangh president Anish Dwivedi is among those taken into custody.
The journalists’ associations in Sitapur, Shahjahanpur, Bareilly, Sultanpur, Bahraich and Barabanki districts on Sunday staged protests against the killing of the scribe in broad daylight on Saturday.
Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) national vice-president Rekha Verma, Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) president Ajay Rai and Apna Dal (Kamerawdi) MLA Pallavi Patel as well as other BJP leaders, including Sitapur’s Maholi MLA Shashank Trivedi and Sitapur district president Rajesh Shukla, visited the journalist’s residence to offer their condolences.
Rekha Verma assured stern action by the state government while Pallavi Patel demanded job and ex gratia for the journalist’s wife. Meanwhile, Uttar Pradesh Congress president Ajai Rai stated the incident shows that there is “jungle raj” in the state and the government is not able to curb crime and maintain law and order. Uttar Pradesh deputy chief minister Brajesh Pathak assured the strictest action against the culprits.
Earlier in the day, the journalist’s family members, friends and relatives allegedly had a scuffle with the local police when they tried to block the road by placing his body instead of taking it for cremation at Naimisharanya. The body was later cremated in the presence of heavy police force.
A Sitapur police official said four lekhpals, including their association president Anish Dwivedi, Ram Singh Rana, DP Singh and Prateek Gupta, as well as a retired army personnel, who stays in the journalist’s neighbourhood, have been taken into custody for questioning. He said the victim’s family members had told the police that the journalist was getting death threats for the past 10 days for exposing anomalies in “dhaan” (paddy) purchase and land purchases in Maholi tehsil of Sitapur after which four lekhpals were suspended.
He said the police had scanned CCTV footage of the incident in which two motorcycle-borne men and a jeep was seen following the journalist’s motorcycle only a few minutes before the motorcycle-borne assailants shot him dead near Hempur railway crossing on Lucknow-Delhi national highway under the Imaliya Sultanpur police station.
Investigation also revealed that the journalist was shot dead around 3 pm when he left his Maholi residence on a motorcycle to meet the local tehsildar Raghvendra on the Maholi tehsil premises at around 2.45 pm.