Bengaluru cops mess up and how!

Bengaluru: In a bizarre incident, an 18-year-old youth and his mother who came all the way from Kolar to the city received a shock of their lives when they were surrounded by the plain-clothed policemen on Tuesday. They had come to the city to collect an LED TV that they had won as a gift from their mobile service provider.

Nandini Layout police on Monday had clandestinely sent messages and made repeated calls to the Tata Docomo mobile number belonging to Sawood Ahmed, a 2nd PU student and resident of in Kolar, stating that his number had won a 40-inch Samsung LED TV and requested them repeatedly to collect it.

Sawood who was doubtful, made his mother and friends speak to the person on the other side. Finally the mother and the son finally decided to come down to Bengaluru to collect their gift.

They arrived in the city at around noon and were asked to come near a footwear showroom in Vijay Nagar. When they reached Vijay Nagar, they were asked to come to Rajkumar Samadhi in Nandini Layout. When they reached and called the number, three men in plain clothes claiming to be the police took them to Nandini police station.

It was then the duo realized that they were being trapped by the cops for a lost Asus Zenfone, worth Rs. 12,000. Both the son and the mother were detained at the police station for nearly three hours. Though they repeatedly told the police that the new mobile number was purchased from a shop in Kolar by providing proper documents that belonged to Sawood’s father Masood Ahmed, a BEML employee, the police were in no mood to listen.

It was only after an activist from an NGO – Movement for Justice approached the Nandini Layout police station for the duo’s help, the cops checked for authentic details from the service provider and let the mother and son walk away. “We were surrounded by the plain clothes policemen as if my son had done some heinous crime and once the cops discovered they had bungled up, they just let go off the complainants Santhosh and Vinod, who casually walked away,” said 38-year-old Tasleem Ghousiya, Sawood’s mother. “I not only wasted an entire day coming to Bengaluru absenting from my college, but was meted out with threats and harassment by the police to accept that I had stolen,” said Sawood who is a singer and a state level marathon runner.

Bengaluru police not the only ones!
On April 4, an 18-year-old youth, Sameer Ahmed Henniker, also a second PU student and a resident of Roshan Mohalla in Honnavar was picked up by CID sleuths from Cooch Behar in West Bengal for the kidnap of a 15-year-old girl. It was a habeas corpus at the High Court where the complainant, the minor girl’s father, had allegedly received several calls and messages from Sameer’s number and that the two had interacted. During investigations, police discovered that the complainant and the minor girl spoke Bengali, not Kannada, while Sameer, the accused, knew only Kannada and not a single word of Bengali.

“We have submitted our observations of our investigations to the court and have told the court that Sameer had no role to play in the kidnap case,” said Swapna Gosh, an investigating police officer from Cooch Behar. Sameer Ahmed Henniker, son of a fisherman in Honnavar is still languishing in New Cooch Behar jail, awaiting his bail plea hearing.