The much-hyped hunt for the stolen buffaloes of State Urban Development Minister Md Azam Khan ended on Sunday morning after police recovered all the seven buffalos giving respite to the police higher-ups in the state capital.
But the thieves are still at large, and the police is not too keen to arrest them. A massive hunt was launched on Saturday after a caretaker Moshid Rafiq lodged a complaint that seven buffaloes were stolen from the farmhouse in Pasiyapura village under Thanaganj police station at the outskirt of Rampur city. The police when came to know that buffaloes belonged to Azam Khan, who is famous for throwing tantrums, it launched “Operation Buffalo Hunt”. Around 100 policemen, drawn from five police stations, were put on the trail of the missing buffaloes.
Superintendent of police, Rampur, Sadhna Goswami who herself led the hunt, said declared that all the 7 buffaloes have been traced. Earlier reports suggested that only 5 of the seven buffaloes were traced till Sunday evening.
“The buffaloes are back in the shed”, she told reporters in Rampur giving a pat to the police team that had carried out this job “Police had also deployed sniffer dogs to trace the buffalos. Police went to nearby slaughter houses, searched adjoining forest areas and even went around the village enquiring about buffaloes,” she said. “At last we are able to trace the,” she said.
Insiders in police find fault with the statement of SP, Rampur. They claim that two buffaloes returned to the farm-house of their own while the remaining five were found abandoned in a nearby village on Sunday.
Interestingly, none was arrested in the theft so far and the investigations are on.The incident has however made wave in twitter and was source of joke in social media. Daya Shankar Sagar twitted to say: “How come these buffaloes stayed so long with Azam Khan.”. He was referring to the incident when personal staff en bloc gave a letter to Department of Personnel saying they would not be able to work with Azam Khan.
Another twipple Biswaranjan Banerjee said that Khan had recently gone to Spain. He must have ssen Bullfight there are tried to emulate Bhainsa fight in UP. Scares these animals ran away.The best came from a police officer who said: “These buffaloes must have gone to Meerut to attend Modi’s rally. They were more safe there.”Meanwhile, the incident also remained a butt of joke for the opposition parties as they criticised Samajwadi Party for engaging huge manpower in the search of the buffalos.
BJP spokesperson Vijay Bahadur Pathak said that such act of police shows how the ministers were misusing the power in the present government. UP Congress spokesperson Amarnath Agarwal said that this Akhilesh Yadav government seemed only concerned to the care for the animals of the ministers while the general people were ignored as far as their security is concerned.