Bahraich violence: 5 suspects held after encounter with UP cops, 2 suffer gunshot injuries
Bahraich (UP), Oct 17: Five suspects in the killing of a man that triggered violence in Bahraich were arrested here Thursday after an encounter with the Uttar Pradesh Police in which two of them suffered gunshot injuries, a senior official said.
The accused were allegedly trying to flee to Nepal, which shares a border with Bahraich district in Uttar Pradesh, the officer said.
"Five accused have been arrested," Additional Director General of Police (Law and Order) Amitabh Yash told a news channel.
On the encounter, he said, "I have information of exchange of fire and gunshot injuries."
Yash, who is also the chief of the Special Task Force of the Uttar Pradesh Police, said the Bahraich police, investigating the murder and subsequent violence, has already established the link of one of the accused in Nepal.
The condition of the duo is stated to be stable.
Director General of Police (DGP) Prashant Kumar said those arrested have been identified as Mohammad Faheen, Mohammad Sarfaraz and Abdul Hameed, who are named accused in the FIR -- and two others Mohammad Taleem alias Sabloo and Mohammad Afzal.
According to Kumar, a police team arrested Faheen and Taleem. Acting on the information given by the duo, the team went to recover the weapon used in the murder in the Nanpara area of the district, however, it came under fire from Hameed, Sarfaraz and Afzal. In retaliatory firing, Sarfaraz and Taleem were seriously injured.
"They are being treated. The weapon used in the murder has been recovered," the UP Police chief said in a statement.
A doctor at a local health care centre said, "Two people were brought here around 2.35 pm. One of them was named Sarfaraz and the other Taleem. One of them had injuries on his left leg and the other on his right leg."
"The bullets are still inside their bodies. I have referred them to the district hospital in Bahraich for X-ray and further management. Both are in normal condition," he told reporters.
Violence broke out at Maharajganj in the Mahsi tehsil of Bahraich district on Sunday allegedly over loud music being played outside a place of worship during a Durga Puja immersion procession.
A local, Ram Gopal Mishra, 22, part of the passing group, died of gunshot wounds in the ensuing violence, triggering vandalism and arson in the area with mobs torching several houses, shops, showrooms, hospitals and vehicles.
Meanwhile, Rukhsar, the daughter of accused Abdul Hameed, the landlord accused of firing at Mishra, said, "At around 4 pm yesterday, my father and two brothers, Sarfaraz and Faheem, and another youth were picked up by the UP STF."
"My husband and brother-in-law have already been picked up. There is no news of them. We fear that they may have been killed in an encounter," she claimed in a video.
Shortly after the encounter, the Samajwadi Party took to social media citing "rampant crimes" in the state and questioned if "riots and encounters" were being staged to divert people's attention from law and order issues.
"Crimes are rampant in the BJP-Yogi government, jewelery of women, sisters and daughters is being stolen and snatched. Are riots being instigated to divert public attention from these crimes and are encounters being carried out to hush the matter?" the SP's media cell posted on X.
It also attached a clip of a Hindi news article with the headline: "Chain looted from a medicine trader by goons near a state minister's house in Muzaffarnagar".
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
