‘Man handed over to cops now missing’ | India News – Times of India

BAREILLY: Three men, farmer leaders say, were handed over to police on the day of the Banbirpur killings in Lakhimpur Kheri. One of them is now among three that police say they are looking for and will question.
On Sunday, police said they are on the trail of three men after the arrest of Union minister Ajay Mishra’s son Ashish. The first is Ankit Das, who owns one of the cars in the convoy that ran farmers over. Another is Sumit Jaiswal, who had filed the FIR against farmers and was in a purported video from that day seen stepping out of a car in the convoy. The third is Shekhar Bharti. Farmer leaders said he had been taken away by police that day.
“We don’t know why police are not producing all the people farmers handed over to them,” farmer leader Jasbir Singh Virk, president of Bhartiya Sikh Sangathan, told TOI. “One of them, who had said the minister had sent him, died in their custody (Shyam Sundar, a BJP worker) and we don’t know what happened to Shekhar.” The third person handed over to cops, according to farmers, was Lovekush Rana, arrested last Thursday.
Two videos shared widely, farmers said, are proof that Shekhar had been nabbed. In one, purportedly at Banbirpur on the day of the violence, a man is being questioned by farmers. “I am Shekhar Bharti, from Lucknow. I was sitting in the car. I was not driving,” he answers when asked by a protesting farmer who he was and what he was doing there. The man, surrounded by farmers, can’t be seen in the video. In another, he is asked by a cop what he was doing there. “I was in the backseat. The car sped ahead, crushing people. The vehicle Thar (which ran over farmers) was with bhaiya,” he tells the cop. It was not clear who “bhaiya” was. The man in both videos, farmer leaders said, was Shekhar Bharti.
“We had handed Shekhar over to the police. How is he absconding now?” asked Jaimal Dhillon, a farmer who was present at Banbirpur when the cop, later identified as circle officer Sanjay Nath Tiwari, was questioning the man they saw was Shekhar Bharti.
When TOI asked circle officer Tiwari if it was indeed him in the video questioning Shekhar, he said, “Yes, but this information is part of the investigation. I can’t share anything further. Certain things about the investigation can’t be shared until it’s all complete.” ADG (Lucknow zone) SN Sabat told TOI that the SIT alone could comment on where Shekhar is.