Police head constable beaten to death with sticks by mob in Rajasthan's Rajsamand

In yet another incident of lynching, a police head constable was on Saturday beaten to death in Rajasthan's Rajsamand district on Saturday, the police said. Abdul Gani, who was posted at the Bhim Police Station, had gone to Hamela ki Ber village while investigating a case.

"He was returning from the village on his motorcycle when some 4-5 unidentified persons attacked him with sticks," Superintendent of Police Bhuvan Bhushan said. He was rushed to a hospital in Bhim area where he succumbed to injuries, the officer said.

Postmortem will be conducted on Sunday, he said, adding that efforts were being made to identify those involved.

Rajsamand: Head Constable Gani Mohammad who was allegedly attacked when he went to investigate a land dispute in Bhim today, has died during treatment at the hospital. Investigation underway. #Rajasthan pic.twitter.com/uYTPjrHnYx

— ANI (@ANI) July 13, 2019

Rajasthan has been in the news for several lynching cases in the recent past.

In December last year, a 23-year-old Muslim man carrying cattle was allegedly assaulted by locals in Bagheri Khurd village of Rajasthan’s Alwar over suspicion of smuggling cows. Saghir Khan, a resident of Mirzapur village of Alwar district – along with his colleague Mustaq – was driving a pick-up van loaded with cattle. While on their way home, the duo got caught in an incident of road rage. The matter quickly intensified when the men in the other vehicle discovered the cattle. As they tried to escape from a short-cut in the jungles, their pick-up got trapped in mud, a few metres away from the main road. Seeing the alleged attackers heading towards them, Mushtaq escaped, but the mob caught hold of Saghir.

In July 2018, a 28-year-old Muslim man was beaten to death in Rajasthan’s Alwar district by a group of people on suspicion that he was smuggling cows. The victim, Akbar Khan, was a resident of the Ferozepur Jhirka region in neighbouring Haryana. Khan and his friend, Aslam, were transporting two cows on foot through a forest area in Ramgarh’s Lalawandi village, when the villagers surrounded them and started thrashing them. While Aslam managed to escape, Khan was severely beaten up. Jaipur range Inspector-General of Police Hemant Priyadarshi said two of the accused, Dharmendra Yadav and Paramjeet Singh, had been arrested.

The incident came just over a year after a dairy farmer, Pehlu Khan, was lynched by a mob of cow vigilantes near Behror in Alwar district. Pehlu Khan and four others were transporting cows in vehicles to Haryana’s Nuh district, when they were stopped on the Jaipur-Delhi national highway and assaulted on April 1, 2017. In another incident, cow vigilantes had killed Umar Khan near Govindgarh in Alwar district in November 2017.