With families of the Hathras victim and the accused trading charges and escalating caste tension in the region, the Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up to probe the sequence of events stepped up its investigation.
The SIT has now called 40 persons from the village who were present at the spot where the deceased was consigned to flames by the district administration, for quizzing.
Earlier, the SIT members had inspected the cremation site and recorded the statement of the victim’s brother besides inspecting the victim’s house.
The state government has given another 10 days to the SIT to submit its findings.
However, the CBI has already taken up the case and started preliminary investigation of the incident.
Meanwhile, after reports of caste tension in the region, the state government on Wednesday rushed ADG Rajiv Krishna and DIG Shalabh Mathur to assess the situation at ground zero.
The two officers would be camping in Aligarh and Hathras for the next one week and defuse tension in the area. The two have been asked to report to the DGP after meeting local people and panchayats.
The security of the victim’s family has already been enhanced.
Back at the village, the families of the victim and the accused traded charges which also added to the growing caste tension in the region.
While the victim is a Dalit, those accused are from the upper caste.
On Thursday, a queer twist was given to the veracity of the incident after prime accused Sandeep and his three co-accused wrote to the superintendent of police of Hathras from Aligarh jail, pleading innocent and claiming that they were framed in the case.
The other accused are Luvkush, Ravi and Ramu and they all are related to Sandeep.
The accused maintained that they were implicated by the girl’s family. Sandeep claimed in the letter that he was friends with the girl and spoke over the phone and met her frequently. He claimed that on the fateful day, he had called the girl to the fields and when she came along with her mother and brother, he left the place immediately and joined his father in feeding the cows. He said later, he learnt that the girl’s brother assaulted her leading to her hospitalisation and ultimately death.
As per the police investigation, 104 calls were made from the phone used by the victim’s family to Sandeep in 143 days between October 2019 to March, 2020. However, the girl’s brother refuted the claim saying that there was only one phone in the house which was kept by his father. He also claimed that the phone was lost after which they arranged another SIM. He alleged that it was a conspiracy by the police to protect the accused.
The girl’s family even moved the Allahabad High Court seeking intervention against their detention at their house in the name of providing security to the family.
Against the backdrop of the Hathras incident, the state government said that anti-national forces are trying to create caste clashes and the security agencies even detected money trails of around Rs 100 crore, including Rs 50 crore from Mauritius and other countries.
The police also arrested four PFI members, one from Kerala, for hatching the conspiracy and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) was probing their funding.
