Released With Apology for ‘Confusion’

LUCKNOW / AGENCIES

A journalist working for the prestigious newspaper the Hindu was detained here on Friday in connection with the ongoing protests over the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, but police officials denied making any such detention.

Journalist Omar Rashid of The Hindu said he was sitting in a restaurant with his friends when police in plain clothes picked him up labelling him a “rioter”.

“I told them that I am a journalist, showed them my identity card, and asked why they were taking me with them. They took away my phone and hurled abuses too,” he said.

He said one of his friends, Robin Verma, was also taken into custody at the Hazratganj police station and was allegedly beaten with a belt by police.

“The police told me that I had orchestrated the Thursday protest against the CAA in the city and I will be booked for conspiring the episode,” Rashid said.

He said later that they were taken to Sultanpuri police post and released after the intervention of the UP DGP OP Singh.

The scribe said that Circle Officer Hazratganj Abhay Kumar Mishra later came to see him and apologised for the “mistake in identity”.

“The same cops who abused and intimidated me earlier now apologised to me and tried to explain that I was picked up due to a “confusion.” This was despite the fact that I had identified myself as a journalist from the very first moment. The police then let me off,” Rashid wrote in a first-person account for The Hindu.

3 Social Activists Also Detained

Meanwhile, Magsaysay awardee Sandeep Pandey alleged that his wife Arundhati Dhuru, a social activist, and her two friends were also detained briefly at the Hazratganj police station.

Two journos injured in Delhi

In Delhi, two journalists Arun Shankar and Vaisakh Jayapalan of Mathrubhumi News are among those injured in the reckless action by the police.

“Camera was snatched away by the police. It was done with the sole purpose suppressing the truth about their attack on the protestors at Delhi Gate because such were the visuals captured on camera” they said.