Vittal : Police Torture 11-year-old Boy for Stealing Mobile
Vittal, Sep 4 (The Hindu): Three policemen attached to the Vittal station, 60 km from Mangalore, allegedly stripped and tortured an 11-year-old schoolboy, suspected of stealing a mobile phone from the house of his former employer, in an attempt to elicit a confession from the boy on Wednesday.
The boy, who spoke to The Hindu on Thursday, said that he was made to sit without his clothes in the lock-up of the police station for nearly five hours before his parents managed to get him released. Further, in an attempt to cover their tracks the police forcibly discharged the boy from the Bantwal government hospital
where he was undergoing treatment for his injuries.
Even as the doctor at the Bantwal hospital tried to brush the incident away saying that the boy was "acting", a visit to his house revealed that he had a fresh wound on his back. "Doesn’t this look like the gashes on the hides of animals that are whipped?" asked the boy’s father. The boy was also unable to walk properly or stand straight and had to be propped up.
Narrating his ordeal Sharath Nayak (11), the victim, said that he was playing volleyball with his brothers and friends on Wednesday morning when a policeman with a pea-cap (Assistant Sub-Inspector) and two policemen with hats (constables) came up to him in a jeep. "They did not ask me any questions and asked me and my three brothers to get into the jeep," he said. The other three boys were identified as Sandeep Nayak (15), Avinash Nayak (14) and Pradeep Nayak (16).
At the police station, he was separated from the rest of the boys and taken to the lock-up. "In the lock up they forcibly removed my clothes and hit me with a lathi," he alleged. According to him the policemen took turns and entered the room after gaps of 15-20 minutes for interrogation throughout the five hours that he was kept in confinement. "They kept asking me about the mobile phone about which I know nothing," he said.
The boys’ father Gopal Nayak, a farm labourer, said that the brothers were taken away at around 11 a.m. by the police. "They finally let them go at around 4.30 p.m.. They also snatched away the Rs 60 I had with me saying that they fed Dosas to the boys for lunch," he said.
All the four boys appeared to be very scared and are refusing to go to school out of fear that they will be ridiculed by their mates. The police are yet to find any evidence linking them to the theft.
Instead of reacting to the incident, the Circle Inspector of Bantwal tried to prevent The Hindu from publishing the story. Superintendent of Police A S Rao said that he had received a complaint from the family and that the accused police officers had flatly denied the charges. "The investigation has been handed over to the assistant superintendent of police (Puttur Division) who will specifically look for violations of the Juvenile Justice Act by the police," he said.