The State Human Rights Commission has stated that booking four people, who questioned the police action of parking a police vehicle in the middle of a road at Valapattanam in Kannur, with non-bailable offences, is a breach of provisions of the Police Act.
Judicial member of the Commission P Mohandas, in a statement issued on Sunday, December 15, has also directed the district police chief of Kannur to submit a report on it in three weeks. The Commission has taken suo motu case on the incident based on news reports. The case will be considered at the sitting of the Commission to be held at Kannur.
The police arrested four people including a teenager on Saturday allegedly for engaging in a scuffle with a team of policemen. The incident happened while the police tried to fine one of them for smoking in public, while they were on patrol.
The Human Rights Commission member has also observed that though it was right to fine for smoking in public, parking the police jeep in the middle of the road for that, was wrong.
The version of the Valapattanam police is that they found the 18-year-old boy smoking on the roadside. Four men approached the police while they stopped the vehicle on the road to fine the 18-year-old, asking that the police remove their vehicle from the spot as it was blocking vehicular movement and this led to an argument.
In a video that surfaced on the incident, it can be seen that one officer trips and falls during the scuffle. The four people refused to enter the police vehicle though the police asked them to.
Police can be seen in the video forcibly trying to take hold of the four men.
However, the four men reportedly later went to the police station in an auto rickshaw. They have been identified as Nishad, Irshad, Minhaj and Navab, all natives of Valapattanam.