MUMBAI: Indian police have erased any mention of a hate crime after a railways constable killed four passengers including three Muslims on board a moving train near Mumbai.
A constable with India’s Railway Protection Force (RPF) was arrested on Monday after he shot dead four Muslim men, including his own senior, on a moving train.
The accused Chetan Kumar killed a senior RPF official and three passengers. The shooting took place on Monday on a train travelling from Jaipur in the western state of Rajasthan towards Mumbai.
Kumar first opened fire on Tikaram Meena, an assistant sub-inspector with the RPF, before shooting three other passengers, according to an RPF statement.
The three civilian victims have been identified as Abdul Qadirbhai Mohammed Hussain Bhanpurwala, Akhtar Abbas Ali, and Sadar Mohammed Hussain.
After killing one passenger with a visible Muslim appearance, Singh can be seen addressing the passengers in a communally charged speech saying, “If you want to vote, if you want to live in India, then I say, Modi and Yogi, these are the two names, and your Thackeray.”
On August 1, Singh was produced before a magistrate court in Mumbai’s Borivali Court amid high security which granted seven days remand. The court was suddenly cordoned off and journalists gathered outside the court were denied entry.
However, the remand copy doesn’t make any mention his communally charged speech by entirely focusing on Singh’s “illness” and indicates his unstable mind which led him to take an extreme step.
Ssoon after the incident, BJP MLA Manisha Chaudhary told the media that a thorough investigation must be carried out to ascertain the exact reason behind the incident.
“It must be found out if the accused was under depression or if he was disturbed,” she said. Chaudhary spoke of Singh’s “mental illness” even before the police made a statement.
The BJP-led government has written to X, formerly Twitter, asking them to take the video of Singh and of the slain men’s bodies down.
The incident occurred just after the train passed the town of Palghar, around 96km (60 miles) from the state capital, Mumbai.
Kumar pulled the in-house alarm chain – used to stop trains in case of emergencies – and tried to escape, according to a statement from the Western Railways. He was arrested on the outskirts of Mumbai.
