Cops in Mumbai reinstated despite encounter allegations

Even as the Black Lives Matter movement was at its peak, the Maharashtra police recently reinstated policemen who were allegedly involved in police excesses.

Nearly 18 years after Khwaja Yunus, suspect in a bomb blast case died in custody, assistant police inspector Sachin Vaze, who was part of the team under whose custody the suspect was kept, was reinstated last month.

Also Read | Torture is a common tool Karnataka police wields

Along with Vaze, three other cops were reinstated. Khwaja Yunus’s mother Asiya Begum has filed contempt pleas in the Bombay High Court against Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh and the then additional director general of police (current principal secretary (special) home department) Amitabh Gupta.

Also Read | A mother’s long fight for justice

Khwaja Yunus, then 27, a software engineer, was arrested by the Mumbai Crime Branch-CID on December 25, 2002, under the now-repealed Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) along with three others in connection with a blast that took place on December 2, 2002, in Ghatkopar in Mumbai.

The police, on their part, allege he escaped on January 7, 2003, while being escorted to Aurangabad by the police, after the police jeep met with an accident.

Asiya Begum recently filed the petition through senior counsel Mihir Desai, who pointed out that the reinstatement of the policemen amounted to wilful and intentional defiance and non-compliance of the directions and orders passed by the Bombay High Court in April 2004.

Also Read | Police brutality: No functioning redressal system

In another case, Dharavi resident Leonard Valdaris is fighting for justice for his son. His son, 24-year-old Agnelo, and three others, including a minor, were arrested by the Wadala police station on charges of theft, in 2014. The police allegedly beat and sexually abused all four suspects to confess to robbing two gold chains, three gold rings, some cash, a lunch box, and spectacles from a man traveling in the local train. It was alleged that the youth was murdered and then the body was thrown on the tracks. The case is now in the Bombay High Court.