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This story is part of our series on Police Impunity in India. Reporters from The News Minute and Newslaundry are travelling across states to bring you stories of negligence and abuse of power by the police, and how minorities and marginalised sections suffer the most. Read the other stories here.
In May 2020, a Black man named George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight by a police officer in Minneapolis. He had been arrested outside a store for allegedly using a counterfeit twenty-dollar note. The officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes while he lay on the ground next to a police car. Floyd suffocated to death, and the incident triggered worldwide protests against police brutality.
Two years later, something eerily similar occurred closer to home in Bhiwandi, Maharashtra. The family of a man suspected of chain snatching say he was killed by police officers who allegedly choked him to death with their bare hands. There was no viral video or national outrage.
The police say the man, Sadiq Ali Jafri, had died of natural causes. His wife and family allege he was killed by the police in an elaborate cover-up, and that the family was subsequently harassed and targeted by the police. Sadiq’s father spent a year and a half in jail, one of his brothers is currently in jail, and his wife Saiba is currently trying to navigate a hostile system to secure justice.
But Saiba got her first glimpse of hope in September last year when the Bombay High Court, which was hearing the family’s petition, ordered a fresh probe into Sadiq’s death.
Newslaundry spoke to Sadiq’s family and neighbours and scrutinised multiple police and court documents to piece together the story so far.
The story of Sadiq’s death
Saiba Jafri presently lives in Goa with her mother and her three-year-old son. She said that in February 2022, she had been 23 years old, three months into her marriage with Sadiq, and pregnant.
At about 9.30 pm on February 10, 2022, she said, she was at the family-owned paan shop with Sadiq and his brother Yadullah.
“Sadiq asked me to watch over the shop while he stepped out to collect daily rent from a driver to whom he had rented his auto-rickshaw,” Saiba told Newslaundry. “He couldn’t find the driver and was on his way back. He was hardly 200 metres away from the shop when we heard him shouting for help. He was calling our names, saying the police were taking him away.”
Saiba and Yadullah say they went running and saw “one policeman with his arm tightly wrapped around Sadiq’s neck from behind” while “two others were holding his hands” along with an auto-rickshaw driver.
“My husband was clearly struggling to breathe. I remember him shouting, ‘Saiba, saans nahi le paa raha hoon (Saiba, I can’t breathe)’,” Saiba alleged. She would later tell the police, the courts, and this reporter that she pleaded with the police to let go but they refused, and that Sadiq “collapsed and fell unconscious”.
She alleged one of the policemen said, “Yeh saala toh mar gaya" (This guy is dead). The police left, she said, in an auto, while she and Yadullah took Sadiq to a local clinic, and then to a hospital in Bhiwandi where “he was declared dead on arrival”.