After the death of two persons in Bihar's Katihar during protests against electricity outage, officials claimed that they did not die in police firing, but by bullets shot by an "unidentified" person. Releasing a CCTV footage of the incident, the Katihar police said that it was a "planned conspiracy".
"It is a planned conspiracy. We had been smelling a rat since the police had fired its shots from a place too far to have hit any of the protesters," District Magistrate Ravi Prakash and Superintendent of Police Jitendra Kumar made the claim while sharing with the press a CCTV footage of the incident that took place on Wednesday.
Two persons had died while several others, including many police personnel and power department officials, were injured in the district's Barsoi area where a demonstration demanding better electricity supply turned violent.
The officials claimed that the CCTV footage showed a gun-toting man "coming from the direction where the first death took place. He can be then seen shooting at and injuring two other bystanders, one of whom died later".
Notably, while Khurshid Alam had died on the spot, Sonu Kumar Sahu succumbed to injuries at a hospital a few hours later. Another person, Neyaz Alam, is undergoing treatment at a hospital in Siliguri in West Bengal for his bullet injury. The officials said an FIR has been lodged, both against named and unidentified persons, though they did not disclose the identities of the accused. They, however, asserted that all the accused will be brought to book soon.
The CPI(ML) Liberation, which is a part of the ruling Mahagathbandhan but supports the Nitish Kumar government from the outside, on Thursday criticised the police action against the protestors. It sent a delegation led by MLA Sudama Prasad to Barsoi to "probe the matter".
