A police constable shot dead an Apple area sales manager through the windscreen as he was driving home from office in the early hours in Lucknow on Saturday, prompting his wife to call the Uttar Pradesh police “psycho killers” and “mad dogs”.
Kalpana Tiwari said her husband Vivek, 40, was with a woman colleague whom he planned to drop at her home on his way when two police constables on a motorbike accosted them and shot him in the chest.
Constables Prashant Chaudhary and Sandeep Kumar, who have been arrested, told reporters they had found Vivek in an intimate position with a woman in a parked SUV and shot him when he tried to run them over after being challenged.
“The police should have arrested him instead of killing him if they saw something wrong,” Kalpana, who has two young daughters, said.
The state police have acquired a reputation as a trigger-happy force since Yogi Adityanath took over as chief minister in March last year and adopted a policy of “encounters” to make the state “crime-free”.
“If needed, we will recommend a CBI probe into the incident,” Adityanath said on Saturday.
Tiwari’s widow Kalpana. PTI
Vivek’s woman colleague told reporters: “He was driving me home when the policemen intercepted us as if we were criminals and shouted at us to step out. While we were trying to figure out what offence we had committed, the car touched their motorcycle. One of them then fired from a pistol.”
Vivek had been working late at his Gomti Nagar office because of a product launch on Friday, Kalpana said. “He called me at 1.30am to say he would be home in half an hour after dropping his woman colleague,” she said.
“I got a call at 3am from the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital saying my husband had been admitted there with minor injuries. After reaching the hospital, I found he had been shot at.”
Vivek, who had been taken to the hospital by the constables who shot him, died around 5am. “We had voted Adityanath to power hoping he would ensure better law and order. I want to ask him why his police have destroyed my family,” Kalpana said.
Chaudhary, who told reporters it was he who shot Vivek, had taken part in two “encounters” last year in Unnao and Barabanki. He didn’t explain where he had got the pistol on Friday night, for a constable is not entitled to carry firearms unless he is on a special mission. A police source said it was an illegal pistol.
“The car was parked in a corner and he (Vivek) was in an intimate position with a woman. He tried to kill us when we asked him what he was doing at that time of night,” Chaudhary told reporters. “I fired when he hit our bike thrice with his car.”
State director-general of police O.P. Singh said: “The guilty constables have been arrested. It’s a clear case of murder. A probe is in progress on the basis of a case registered by the woman colleague of the deceased.”
Adityanath last week boasted that the state police had carried out 2,200 “encounters” under him. Some 68 people have been killed and over 400 arrested following these purported gunfights. The Opposition alleges that most of the dead were innocent.
A few months ago, two policemen were suspended after shooting at a youth returning from a wedding in Noida. The victim survived.