Two Jammu and Kashmir policemen, who were part of a senior minister’s escorts, have been arrested after they beat a traffic police official who had stopped the minister’s convoy from jumping a traffic signal at Moulana Azad Road-Tourist Reception Centre intersection here on Monday evening.
Chief minister Omar Abdullah assured “strongest possible action” against the accused. “The cops who beat the traffic police officer have been arrested and booked. I have asked for strongest possible action under law,” he said on the microblogging site Twitter. Senior Congress leader and minister for public health engineering, irrigation and flood control Taj Mohiuddin denied he had jumped the traffic signal. “Those who have done it are not my personal staff. They are from Jammu and Kashmir police who were in the rear escort. I came to know about the incident about one hour later,” he said pleading innocence.
But the traffic police official, Mohan Lal, who was injured in the attack and had to spend the night in hospital, said that it was the minister’s driver who jumped the red signal and when he stopped him and told him that he had violated the traffic rule he stopped the car in the middle of the road. “I knew a minister was onboard. I requested the driver to move the car to one side of the road but he in a threatening expression told me, “Don’t you know whose car you have stopped?” “I said, ‘I know it’s the minister. We honour him, but what you did is wrong’.” Incensed by this, the minister’s PSOs got down from the car and thrashed one of his colleagues. “I said if you have any complaint you should speak to our seniors. And when I tried to stop them from attacking my colleague, the other one hit me on my face with the butt of his service rifle,” the official said.
The blatant abuse of power has evoked widespread condemnation across Jammu and Kashmir. Police officials here said that two security guards of the minister, identified as Muhammad Shaffi and Muhammad Abbas, have been arrested after a case of attempt to murder was registered.