A 28-year-old woman was shot dead allegedly during a raid in Uttarakhand by a police team from Uttar Pradesh that had come to the hill state on Monday in search of a sand pilferer.

Gurtaj Singh Bhullar, a block-level leader at Bharatpur in the Kunda area of Uddham Singh Nagar district, has said in a written complaint to the local police that the cops from Uttar Pradesh surrounded his farmhouse on Wednesday evening.

“They were in plain clothes. They opened fire when we tried to speak to them. My wife Gurjit Singh, 28, was returning from somewhere and she was hit by a bullet in the chest. She was declared dead at a local hospital. When villagers protested, the police fired at them also,” Bhullar told reporters on Thursday. “The police barged into my farmhouse on the basis of a half-baked tip-off.”

Shalabh Mathur, the deputy inspector-general of Moradabad range, said: “Our police team was there along with cops from Uttarakhand to arrest Mohammad Zafar, a sand mafia member who had run away from Moradabad and was hiding somewhere in Kunda. Some villagers took the police team hostage and attacked them when they went there in search of the criminal. A woman died and five policemen suffered injuries in a clash between the villagers and the police.”