Police has detained nine more scrap dealers in the Deonar dumping ground fire case but their families claim that the police has falsely implicated them owing to pressure from seniors to crack the case
Police has detained nine more scrap dealers in the Deonar dumping ground fire case but their families claim that the police has falsely implicated them owing to pressure from seniors to crack the case of repeated fires at the dumping ground.
So much so, social worker, Irfan Diwate, claimed that in the past two days, police has unnecessarily detained youngsters who are not even involved in any activity like burning garbage. Among the nine persons detained on Monday, there are two college students – a 12th standard student Ishtiyak Shaikh studying in Ayesha College and 20-year-old Aarif Malik studying hardware engineering at Sabu Siddique College.
After Mr Diwate and parents of these children went to the police station to inform police that their children were not involved in burning garbage, the police refused to leave them and behaved rudely. “Police told us that whoever they find near the dumping ground wall will be arrested. It is a prohibited area and no one can roam around there,” said Mr Diwate. Parents of Mr Shaikh and Mr Malik are labourers and have taken money from other people to pay the required fines to get their children released.
Mr Shaikh’s mother, Sehnaj Shaikh, who drives a truck just to pick up and drop garbage, said, “We did not even know that the police took my son. Later on, he called me to inform that the police had arrested him. Initially, he didn’t even know that he was arrested in the Deonar dumping ground fire case. The fire is raging in the dumping ground for the past so many years. Our family has been suffering for the past many years but the government and police have realised only now. They are not helping us get out of the problem but unnecessarily creating further problems.”
