Thursday’s hostage episode involving freeing of 19 persons, including 17 children, snowballed into a major controversy on Friday, with lawyer-activist Nitin Satpute threatening to move the Bombay High Court over what he called a “fake encounter” of hostage-taker Rohit Arya and the Opposition demanding a “thorough inquiry”.
Alleging that the killing of 50-year-old Arya who held 19 persons, including 17 children, as hostages inside an audition-studio at Powai in north-east Mumbai, as a “fake encounter”, lawyer Satpute demanded to know as to why “Rohit was shot in his chest, the upper part of body and not in lower part of body?” “The police could have settled the issue. It’s a fake encounter, the encounter was done only to hide failure of the State police machinery due to high pressure from superiors, who failed to protect innocent children,” Satpute said.
The Maharashtra Government is solely responsible for the kidnapping of 17 minors and 2 adults. The State Government cheated and duped deceased Rohit Arya for `2 crore, as per his statement”.
“Since he had not received a payment of `2 crore from the State Government, Arya decided to end his life but later on he changed mind and used the idea of so-called kidnapping. He was under tremendous tension for not receiving his official dues from the Government,” Satpute said.
“Police are made hero; we will have to find out the truth by filing a writ petition for investigation of death. The State had put the life of children in danger,” he said.
In a related development, Maharashtra Congress president Harshvardhan Sapkal demanded a thorough inquiry into the circumstances leading to the “killing” of hostage-taker Rohit Arya in Thursday’s incident.
“The man (hostage-taker) was reportedly mentally unstable, yet he had earlier worked on government initiatives such as Sundar Mazi Shala (My Beautiful School) and had shared platforms with then Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and School Education Minister Deepak Kesarkar. This incident needs a thorough inquiry,” Sapkal said.
During the course of police investigations, it has come to light that Arya had earlier alleged that the government owed him some payment for carrying out a sanitation campaign called the PLC Sanitation Monitor Project, launched under the Chief Minister’s My School, Beautiful School campaign, which was aimed to make schoolchildren “ambassadors of cleanliness”.
Arya had gone on record saying that the department concerned had sanctioned Rs 2 crore for his work but had not paid him since January 2024. Arya had gone on hunger strike last year alleging that department officials had side-lined from the programme despite personal assurances given to him from the then Education Minister Deepak Kesarkar.
Arya had claimed that the then minister had issued him two cheques of Rs 7 lakh and Rs 8 lakh as personal assistance, promising more later which “were not fulfilled”.