Police raided the house of poet Munawwar Rana on the intervening night of July 1 and 2 and misbehaved with the women folk there, according to a complaint lodged on Friday morning.
On June 28, Rana’s son Tabrez had alleged that mask-wearing men on motorcycles had fired indiscriminately on his vehicle in Rae Bareli. In a subsequent police complaint, he had named five relatives, with whom the family was locked in a land dispute. While investigations are still on, police revealed that Tabrez appeared to have organised the firing on his own to implicate his relatives.
According to Tabrez’s wife Nayla, around 1.15am on July 2, ‘dozens of policemen’ without a search warrant barged into the home she shares with her famous father-in-law and ‘misbehaved’ with the women present there. “On our resistance, the police called a policewoman from the Hussainganj thana… till then, they misbehaved with the women in the house,” she said.
Rana lives in an apartment block in Lucknow’s Hussainganj area.
As per Nayla, the Rae Bareli police had, under pressure from the accused, been insisting that her husband compromise with his attackers. In her complaint, she said that her husband had been receiving phone calls wherein he was told in a ‘threatening voice’ to compromise. “However, he has insisted on a fair investigation and thus it appears that the police are trying to implicate him under pressure from the accused,” said the complaint.
The raid on Rana’s house was in search of Tabrez.
Nayla also alleged that except for two policemen in the raiding party, the others had removed their name tags. “When my sister-in-law’s daughter made a video of the police misbehaviour, they snatched away the phone,” she alleged.
The complaint alleges that the police team had not only grossly violated the human rights of the complainant’s family but had also come to the house with an intention to “loot”.
“They said that you will all be labelled terrorists and Naxalites and jailed,” said Nayla.
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“Barging into a home with women without any warning or prior information is also an attack on our privacy,” she said. An added allegation is that the police warned the family to not talk about the incident to anyone or else there was a video made of the women that would be circulated on social media.
Meanwhile, the police have disclosed that Tabrez had a long meeting with the shooters prior to the incident at a hotel in Rae Bareli.
Tabrez is yet to be traced.
