Sat 01 February 2020:
Two days after a teenager shot a protester in the Indian capital, another firing has been reported at an all-women sit-in site in New Delhi against a controversial new citizenship law.
Police said no protester was wounded after a man fired a gun at Shaheen Bagh, the hub of nationwide protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which critics say violates India’s secular constitution and is “anti-Muslim”.
Witnesses told Al Jazeera the suspect shouted “Jai Shri Ram” (Hail Lord Ram, a Hindu deity) as he fired “two to three shots” in the Muslim-dominated area where hundreds of women have been protesting since mid-December.
A witness said the suspect, identified by the police as Kapil Gujjar, also shouted: “Only Hindus will prevail in this country. This country is ours.”
Police said Gujjar is a resident of Dallupura village on the outskirts of the Indian capital, and has been taken into custody.
“The man had resorted to aerial firing. Police immediately overpowered and caught him,” police officer Chinmay Biswal told the ANI news agency.
Delhi: The man, who had fired bullets in Shaheen Bagh area, has been taken by police into their custody. More details awaited. https://t.co/MmCwK1l58m pic.twitter.com/cDmaDrIXa6
— ANI (@ANI) February 1, 2020
Mohammad Akhlas, who was present at Shaheen Bagh when the shooting happened, told Al Jazeera: “We first thought it was a tyre burst. But later some women came running and said a man fired towards the protest site.”
Other witnesses at Shaheen Bagh told Al Jazeera the firing created panic, with some women leaving the protest site after they heard the gunshots. They later returned to continue their sit-in.
A group of protesters held a march to the local police station, raising slogans against the attacker and the police.
NDTV website quoted a witness saying the gunman fired at the protesters, “while police officers were standing just behind him”.
“He had a semi-automatic pistol and fired two rounds … When his gun jammed, he ran. He tried to fire again, then tossed the gun into the bushes and tried to escape,” NDTV quoted the witness as saying.
A similar incident happened on Thursday when a 17-year-old attacker fired at a protest rally outside New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) university as police officers stood behind him.
Thursday’s shooting, which took place barely two kilometres (1.24 miles) from Shaheen Bagh, wounded a JMI student from Indian-administered Kashmir. The student is undergoing medical treatment.
Dramatic photos and videos of the man brandishing a single-barrel gun and shouting slogans at the protesters went viral on Indian social media.
The teenage suspect was arrested and is being interrogated by New Delhi’s police.
The two shootings came just days after India’s minister of state for finance, Anurag Thakur, encouraged supporters at a state election rally in New Delhi to chant slogans, calling for “the traitors to be shot”.
Thakur’s statement drew a reprimand from the country’s election commission ahead of state assembly elections in the Indian capital.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES
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