“Police had beaten him up and humiliated him because he was a Muslim. After a while, the police officers took Faizan and the other men to GTB Hospital in a white-coloured police Gypsy…no doctor spoke to him and all the medical inquiry and treatment were carried out by doctors on the instructions of the police. Faizan was given stitches to his head and ear. Faizan said that after this the policemen took him and some other men to the Jyoti Nagar police station.”
This is an excerpt from Faizan’s dying declaration, submitted before the Delhi High Court. You may remember him as the 23-year-old who was seen lying semi-conscious on the road, battered, taunted, and forced to sing the national anthem by helmeted custodians of law, in a viral video that had surfaced amid the 2020 northeast Delhi riots. He had died two days after the assault.
There were four other men in the video. Among them was Kausar Ali, who also told the high court that the police “mercilessly assaulted us”. “After a while, a police jeep came and they put five of us, injured men, in the back of the jeep and took us to GTB Hospital. The police officers took all five of us inside the hospital. There the doctor spoke to the police officers and wrote something on a piece of paper.”
Even the police had confirmed in a status report that staff of the Jyoti Nagar police station had taken the five to hospital.
These statements corroborated a single truth: that a string of policemen posted in Kardampuri were responsible for the assault and for the transfer to the hospital on February 24, 2020.
But cut to 2024, that very truth has remained elusive. Despite clear duty charts, no police official has been held responsible for what the high court has termed a hate crime. The probe has been transferred to the CBI after the court gave a stinging indictment of the “tardy” police investigation.
However, it will not be smooth for the agency as evidence has been compromised at the very start.
Newslaundry has now found that Faizan’s and Kausar’s medico-legal certificates – important documents in any criminal case which is a medico-legal case – had left out mandatory details about who brought the two to the hospital on February 24.
According to Rebecca John, a senior criminal lawyer at the Supreme Court, MLC gives the “first account” in a criminal case. “It not only records the injuries or the lack of injuries on a person but it also records who produced the accused person. Leaving that column blank is a bit suspicious. Because it cannot be called inadvertent, it is suspicious.”
The needle of suspicion points to the hospital too.
Parsing through hospital records, Newslaundry found at least six other MLCs of Delhi riot victims – all of them threw up names under the ‘brought by’ section.