Muslim man killed, body discovered 8 days after the violence erupted in Khargone

Indore: After being missing for last eight days, police in Madhya Pradesh found 28-year-old Ibraish Khan's body on Monday at MY Hospital in Indore, 126 kilometers from Khargone, the location of the anti-Muslim violence last week.

The body of the first person to die in the conflict was handed over to his family in the early hours of April 18 ( Monday),exactly one week after the violence broke out in Khargone on April 10 during a Ram Navami procession.

Khargone police reported that Ibris, the resident of the Islampura area, was found soaked in blood near Kapas Mandi, located 300 meters away from his home around 1 am after officials from Mandi and security guards from Salve reported that a group of over eight-nine men were attacking a lone man. They ran away as police reached the spot.

Ikhlaq Khan, Ibrahim's brother, claims that his brother was attacked by the Hindutva rioters on 10 April.

As reported in their complaint, Ibris' eldest brother, Ikhlak, stated that Ibris had left for the mosque at 7:30 p.m. and had not returned home since then. The family checked the homes of their family and friends, but could not locate him.

Following a convoy of three police vehicles, the family reached MY Hospital around 3 am on April 18 and retrieved the body. Following confirmation, the body was handed over to the family, who performed his last rites around 8 am.

Mumtaz, his mother, refuted the police's claim that he was found at 1 am near Kapas Mandi saying "He left home around 7 pm to offer iftar at Anand Nagar mosque, which is metres away from home when the clash broke in the locality. Couple of minutes later, we spotted that police as well as rioters attacking him, and before we intervened, Police dragged in a jeep and took him to the police station. Ibris's friends who were detained by the police also confirmed that police brought him to the police station with a head injury, but he was not sent to jail with them. Since then, he was missing."

"We kept pleading before policemen, but no one told us anything. They registered our missing complaint with their own facts instead of our complaint," Mumtaz alleged.

Asked to respond to the family's allegations SP Keswani said, "If the police had detained him, his name would be in the register. Unfortunately, his name is not."