Balloons with ‘I love Pak’ print seized from Kanpur

New Delhi: A packet of balloon, with “I love Pakistan” written on it in English and Urdu, sent a police team from Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh into a tizzy after a city-based lawyer, who had bought the packet to celebrate his son’s birthday, approached them.

Preliminary probe reveals when the team checked, the vendor allegedly told them that he had bought the packets from Sadar Bazar in Delhi. Swinging into action, the team from Kanpur, in a joint effort with a Delhi police team, conducted a raid in the national capital on Thursday.

It all began when a Kanpur-based lawyer, Ajay Pratap Singh, a resident of Kidwai Nagar, went to a local shop to buy a packet of balloons to celebrate his son’s birthday. Along with other family members when Mr Singh blew air into the balloons, a message that allegedly read “I Love Pakistan,” became visible. Shell-shocked upon reading the message, Mr Singh checked the packet and found that all the balloons had the same message printed on them. He immediately alerted the police and produced the packet of balloons.

Considering the gravity of the situation as to how the packet reached the shop with such a message, a team from Kanpur police swung into action and took up the matter. A team went to the shop in question and spoke to the shopkeeper. Upon questioning, the shopkeeper supposedly informed the police that he had bought the packets at wholesale rate from Sadar Bazar in Delhi. The Uttar Pradesh police registered an FIR under IPC Section 153A (Promoting enmity between different groups on grounds of religion) and alerted their counter-parts in Delhi about the same.

On Thursday, a team from Kanpur along with the Delhi police carried out a search in Sadar Bazar.

Jatin Narwal, the deputy commissioner of police (North), said: “A team of Kanpur police, headed by sub-inspector Mohd Asif, came to conduct a raid at a shop in Bahari Market in Sadar Bazar in search of balloons with similar message as was recovered in Kanpur. However, nothing was found in the said shop during the raid conducted by both the states’ police teams. The jurisdictional police team from Sadar Bazar provided all the assistance to the raiding team from Kanpur.”