Bihar cops chase, kill army man

Eyewitness reports said Amitesh spent his last few minutes begging for water even as he bled to death.

Villagers of Balipakad, 80 km from Patna, recounted that Amitesh was chased by two constables and cornered in a bylane. ‘‘They told him three times we will shoot you, the poor boy didn’t even say anything. I begged the policemen not to kill him in front of my house like this. But they shot him in the leg,’’ said Sanhari Devi who watched the whole ‘‘encounter’’.

Eyewitness reports told The Indian Express that Amitesh — father of a two-month old daughter — had bled to death in the back of a police vehicle before as he was being taken to a hospital in Patna.

Another villager Sanjeev Kumar rushed to the spot after he heard the bullet shots. ‘‘He told the policemen that he was a jawan and he told them the name of his regiment, his telephone number. He kept telling them that he was a jawan and not a terrorist.’’ he said. ‘‘He just kept begging them for water to drink. They just kicked him in the leg,’’ he added.

Sanjeev Kumar’s version is corroborated by dozens of villagers who saw the police shooting the jawan in full daylight. On Tuesday afternoon the jawan had gone with his father Avdesh Sharma to the bank to take out money.

His father, a middle school teacher — said that he went home in his vehicle to his Akbarpur village, while his son went with his two friends on a motorcycle.

On the way from the bank to his house a police team who started chasing them waylaid them. At the local Paliganj police station, munshi J.K. Singh says that a local bank had been looted on January 13 of Rs 30,000 and that they had received a tip off that the bank robbers were coming back to loot the bank. And that they were on a motorcycle.

Based on this the police identified Amitesh and his two friends as the robbers and gave chase. Two constables stayed back while the other two gave chase, according to the local police. They were not willing to divulge the name of the four constables.

Amitesh was cornered and killed while the other two managed to escape. The police also says that the trio was armed, but villagers who saw the whole encounter say that Amitesh did not have a weapon.

The police in a statement released to the press also said that Amitesh was an Army deserter and that three warrants had been issued against him. They said that the motorcycle was stolen and that the owner had already identified it. The police, however, grudgingly admit that Amitesh had no criminal record.

Inside his house the jawan’s neatly pressed army uniform complete with his nametag and his spotlessly polished boots hang from the wall almost ready to be worn. On leave for two months, Amitesh had contracted Jaundice, his family said, and had then sent a telegram to the Army office in Danapur asking for a leave extension. ‘‘What did my son do to deserve this? He was not a deserter. The police is now covering up in its own defence and they are putting wrong allegations,’’ Amitesh’s father alleged.

After the postmortem, the family — including Amitesh’s 20-year-old wife Pramilla — brought the body to Kargil Chowk, the memorial to Kargil martyrs in Patna, and waited as an Army regiment arrived from Danapur to give Amitesh a soldier’s funeral with full Army honours.