Anti-CAA protests: UP death toll rises to 18 as Firozabad businessman succumbs to gunshot wound at Delhi hospital

Late Wednesday evening, when The Indian Express met Sheikh at AIIMS Trauma Centre, Haroon was on ventilator. Dr Amit Lathwal, medical superintendent of the hospital, had said, “there’s a bullet lodged in his neck and his condition is critical.”

Sheikh said that on Friday, Haroon was returning home to village Naglamullah in Firozabad district from Pachokhara, which is 20 km away, when the incident took place. He said, “He was returning home after selling a buffalo at a mandi in Pachokhara. On the Firozabad highway, there was violence and suddenly he was shot at — no one knows whether the police or the protesters had fired the shot.”

Haroon is survived by his two brothers and their mother. Sheikh claimed Haroon was not a part of the protest. He said, “some locals who saw him at the site rushed him to a hospital. For three days, he was at a hospital in Agra and on Wednesday morning, we got him to AIIMS Trauma Centre.”

On Wednesday evening, Firozabad SP Sachindra Patel said, “We have learnt from locals that one Haroon got injured in the violence and his family got him admitted at a hospital in Delhi. The police have no information how Haroon got injured and when he was taken to Delhi for treatment.”

In another emergency ward at the Delhi hospital lay a 17-year-old boy from Meerut, who has a bullet lodged in his spine. The teen’s mother requested not to be identified out of “fear of the police”.

Lathwal said, “The victim from Meerut reached the hospital on Saturday. He has a bullet in his spine and is a paraplegic because of it. He is in ICU.”

The teenager’s mother told The Indian Express that her son was returning home from a school books manufacturing unit where he works when he allegedly received a gunshot wound at Meerut’s Lisari Gate. He returned around 5 pm, semi-conscious and in bloodied clothes. “There was a wound on his shoulder and I put first-aid; we didn’t know it was a gunshot wound. He cried all night, as he couldn’t move his arms or legs – we couldn’t take him to hospital, as everything was shut,” said the mother.

On Saturday morning, an X-Ray at a local hospital showed a bullet lodged in his spine and the family rushed him to AIIMS. “Doctors say my son will never walk again. He’s so young…he was not protesting; he didn’t even know about it,” she said.

Meerut SSP Ajay Sahni said, “It has not come to our knowledge that he was injured during the protests. There is a possibility that there was a personal dispute and it has been linked to the protests. There was absolutely no firing from our side.”