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Rampaging Aligarh students thrash IB officers

Sharat Pradhan in Lucknow

Students of the Aligarh Muslim University went on the rampage and manhandled two officers of the Intelligence Bureau in protest against what they termed the 'framing' of two students as activists of the Kashmiri terrorist Hizbul Mujahideen and the Students Islamic Movement of India.

Violence rocked the campus as word spread about the arrest on Monday of Abdul Mobeen, a student of Unani medicine at the university's Tibbiya College.

Mobeen was picked up from the gates of his hostel. The other arrest, of Maroof Mohammed, an AMU alumnus, was made in Agra. Both were said to have confessed to their involvement in the recent bomb blasts in different parts of Uttar Pradesh.

The angry students were looking for IB sleuths whom they squarely blamed for the student's arrest. Spotting a deputy superintendent of police and an inspector from the bureau just outside Habib Hall, from where Mobeen was taken into custody on Monday, the students mobbed them and dragged them inside the hostel where they were mercilessly thrashed, Principal Secretary (Home) V K Mittal said.

It was only when the vice-chancellor and other authorities of the university arrived on the scene that the officers could be saved. They were later handed over to the district authorities. But the district magistrate and senior superintendent of police have not yet initiated any action against the culprits.

Raising four demands, including Mobeen's immediate release, the students have threatened further violence.

Strongly defending SIMI and denying that the organisation was hand-in-glove with the Hizb, they are demanding a high-level inquiry into the antecedents of the arrested students by a panel of four high court judges. The students have also sought the closure of the university while the inquiry is on.

The AMU has about 16,000 students, of whom nearly 10,000 live in hostels spread all over the sprawling campus, so it is practically impossible for the authorities to keep tabs on the activities of all of them.

But the Special Task Force sleuths who carried out Monday's arrests are confident about the terrorist connections of Mobeen and Maroof. They were picked up in connection with the series of blasts on Independence Day in Kanpur and Lucknow as well as on the Sabarmati Express near Faizabad.

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