Days after 24-year-old Muslim youth Arbaaz Aftab was beaten up and beheaded, the Karnataka police have finally made arrests in the case and have identified 9 Hindu men a woman accused including a leader of local Hindutva group.
The police in a new press release have said that Arbaaz was murdered by contract killers because of his interfaith relationship with a Hindu girl, The News Minute reported.
The police arrested the woman’s parents Eerappa and Susheela Kumbhar, Maharaja Nagappa alias Pundalik Mutgekar, leader of a Hindutva group Sri Ram Sena Hindustan who was given the contract to kill Arbaaz and seven other contract killers.
The contract killers are identified as Maruti Pralhad Sugathe, Manjunatha Thukaram Gondali, Ganapathi Jnaneshwara Sugathe, Prashanth Kallappa Patil, Praveena Shankara, Qutubuddin and Shreedhara Mahadeva Doney have also been arrested.
This is the allegation that Muslim man’s family has made since his death.Sameer Parshwadi, kin of deceased earlier told Maktoob that there were continuous death threats from Hindutva groups including Ram Sena because of the love affair between the son of a Muslim family and the girl from a Hindu family.
“It is a cold-blooded murder,” kin of Arbaz claimed. “His hands were tied with rope and his body was cut into different parts.”
Najeema, mother of Arbaz in her complaint accessed by Maktoob, had alleged that the love affair between her son and the Hindu girl and subsequent death threats from Hindutva group lead to her son’s death. In her FIR, Najeema has clearly named three persons Ram Sena’s men Pundalik Maharaj and Birje, and the woman’s father Kumbhar.
According to the police, the woman’s father and Pundalik called Arbaaz to Khanapur, where the woman’s family lived, and because Arbaaz refused to break up with the woman, they killed him. They then chopped his body and left him on the railway track, in order to destroy evidence.
All the accused have been booked under sections 302 (Murder), 201 (Causing disappearance of evidence of offence, or giving false information to screen offender), 341 (punishment for wrongful restraint), 120B (criminal conspircy), 384 (punishment for extortion), 388 (Extortion by threat of accusation of an offence), 149 (Every member of unlawful assembly guilty of offence committed in prosecution of common object) of the Indian Penal Code, among others, TNM reported.
