'Nearly 1,500 to 2,000 outsiders were brought to north-east Delhi and lodged there for nearly 24 hours under a planned conspiracy to unleash violence, Delhi Commission for Minorities chairman Zafarul Islam Khan, alleged on Tuesday, following a visit to the affected areas. He said most of these people stayed in schools before attacking the neighbourhoods. Talking to The Wire about the findings of his team, which visited the areas impacted by violence on March 2, Khan said: “Our revelation is that this was planned violence. For this people had been brought from outside.
'...Mr Munazir's house was looted and torched by a mob of masked and helmeted young men, who swept into the mixed neighbourhood. They were armed with staves, hockey sticks, stones and bottles filled with petrol, and were chanting "Jai Shri Ram", or "Victory to Lord Ram", a greeting which has been turned into a murder cry by Hindu lynch mobs in recent years.
'BJP leader Kapil Mishra, whose incendiary speech is being blamed for instigating the Delhi riots in which at least 48 Indians have been killed, has nine guards protecting him round the clock on the orders of the Union home ministry that reports to Amit Shah. Sources said the Y-category security cover for Mishra, a former AAP MLA who was suspended by the party in 2017 and joined the BJP ahead of last month’s Delhi Assembly elections, is not new and was sanctioned in 2017...'
'"After attacking us, the mob returned to check if we were alive or not. I did not move. They hit me with a stick on my head and then moved towards my father. They thought I was dead but they kept hitting my father on his head, they probably thought he still had chances of surviving," 25-year-old Nitin Kumar, a resident of Brahampuri, recalls the deadly violence in Gali No 1, on the night of 24 February. With forty stitches on his forehead and blood in his left eye, he narrates to The Quint how his father, 51-year-old Vinod Kumar, was beaten up before him.
'In new video evidence released by BBC, members of the Hindu mob have admitted to the Delhi Police helping them pick stones and throw them towards Muslims. “We did not have enough stones here, so the police brought some and told us to throw them,” Himanshu Rathor said in the video. The video also details incidents of violence perpetrated by the police against the Muslims...'
'Delhi police stopped an ambulance ferrying a man with a bullet injury to hospital four times and asked the accompanying doctor each time to remove the dressing and gaped at the wound, the doctor said on Monday. Harjit Bhatti, a medic among the volunteers assisting the riot victims in northeast Delhi last week, said the incident occurred on February 26 while he was transporting the 30-year-old injured man from the Al Hind nursing home to the Guru Tegh Bahadur Hospital, 8km away...'
'Two separate groups of women from the riot-hit areas of north-east Delhi, one of which was present at the Chand Bagh protest on Monday, and one which was present at the violence perpetrated at Shiv Vihar, have told The Wire that members of a right-wing mob pulled down their pants, exposed their genitals to them and said, “Yeh lo azaadi.” (‘Here, take freedom.’) ‘Azaadi’ is part of the rallying cry that protesters across the city have been using to ask for freedom – from the Citizenship Amendment Act, from the National Register of Citizens, from the reign of Narendra Modi and Amit Shah...'
'Academician and women’s rights activist Madhu Purnima Kishwar Tuesday tweeted a video of men in skull caps indulging in violence, in a veiled reference to last week’s communal riots in the national capital... The tweet has so far received over 5,200 retweets and 7,500 likes. Kishwar, chair professor in the Indian Council of Social Science Research who founded women’s journal Manushi in 1979, has over 2 million followers on Twitter... The video shared by Madhu Kishwar is not even from India. It shows events that occurred on 1 December 2018 in Bangladesh’s Gazipur...'
'She was happy to weave through the crowd of strangers in the house and ask for food, but she had not once uttered her name. She looked about two years old. Nobody knew who she was. “We found her near Medina Masjid, crying,” said Saood Alam, a resident of Shiv Vihar in North East Delhi. On February 24, communal violence gripped this part of India’s national capital and reached Alam’s doorstep: a mob set his rented home on fire. Like most other Muslims living in the Hindu-majority area, Alam and his family fled with little more than the clothes on their back.
'In front of a burnt house in Bhagirathi Vihar Nalla Road in riot-hit northeast Delhi, a man clad in the regulation attire of a politician recounted what happened on Tuesday. “They were chanting slogans with religious overtones. Around 7pm, they started throwing stones at us. I called for police help. But the police asked me to leave. We managed to flee before they burnt my house and destroyed everything,” he said. He is Akhtar Raza, the BJP’s minority cell vice-president for the Delhi Northeast district. The façade of Raza’s house has been blackened by riot-ignited fire and smoke.
