Muzaffarnagar riots: Police to exhume body for post-mortem

Four months after the killing of a muslim man in the Muzaffarnagar riots, the police have finally agreed to exhume his body for post-mortem examination, after persistent effort by a rights organisation.

On September 8 last year, when the communal riots at Muzaffarnagar was at its peak, Meher Deen, 50, was found hanging at a house in Dungar village. He had no clothes on his body.

The house owner, Pawan Jat, allegedly summoned three muslim residents of the village, warned them against revealing anything about how the body was found and asked them to bury the body quietly in the village graveyard. They did so. No case was registered as none dared to approach the police.

Members of the social organisation, “Rihai Manch”, learnt about Deen’s case after interacting with a few local people. They also got the statements of the three men who brought his body down from the bamboo stick and buried it.

“We asked the police to exhume the body quickly and have a post-mortem examination conducted to ascertain the cause of death....we also pleaded that any delay will result in destruction of crucial evidence,” said Rajeev Yadav, a member of Rihai Manch, which takes up cases of poor people incapable of fighting them on their own.

“The witnesses were scared and the police were unwilling to do anything...with every passing day the evidence was getting destroyed,” Yadav told Deccan Herald.
Yadav said that the family members of Meher Deen were scared as they had been threatened by offenders. “They are still scared...the police had refused to investigate the matter,” he went on to add.

After over four months, the police finally relented. The body of Meher Deen would be exhumed on Saturday and post-mortem examination would be conducted, said Asad Hayat, a member of the organization and a lawyer, who has filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking a CBI probe into the Muzaffarnagar riots.