New Delhi: Around 7 am last Saturday, Mohammed Shaqib was shown a picture of a man who, he was told, was assaulted in the nearby Nawada district.
“I saw the picture, and to my shock, it was my elder brother,” Shaqib told ThePrint over the phone, adding that the family has been dealt a blow from which it would never recover.
Shaqib’s sibling Mohammed Athar Hussain, the eldest of four brothers, died Friday at a government hospital in Nawada—nearly a week after he was assaulted, allegedly by locals from Bhatta village.
In a video statement recorded from his hospital bed days before his death, Hussain alleged that four men initially locked him in a room. “They returned late at night and stripped me to identify my religion, that I was a miyan ji (Muslim). They then poured petrol on me, branded me with an iron rod, and then one person took a plier and cut off my ear,” Hussain can be heard saying in the video, which ThePrint has accessed.
He adds, “The assault continued as some were beating with sticks, while others were using pliers to cut off my fingers and ear.”
On Hussain’s claim that the assailants stripped him to identify his religion, Nawada Sadar sub-divisional police officer (SDPO) Hulas Kumar told ThePrint over the phone that the victim’s wife did not document this aspect of the assault in her police complaint dated 6 December.
A senior police official in Patna too denied that this was a case of lynching on the basis of religion, and instead termed it a case of “mistaken identity” wherein the deceased was assaulted under suspicion of theft.
Asked about the FIRs against Hussain and his assailants, Bihar Director General of Police (DGP) Vinay Kumar said both cases are being probed and will be taken to a logical conclusion. “The theft case is also being investigated. Focus is more on the lynching case,” he told ThePrint.
Hussain, a hawker who had been selling clothes on a bicycle in Nawada’s rural areas for the last decade, is survived by three children and a wife.
Following his death, Nawada Police added to the FIR section 103 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, which deals with the offence of murder.
Police have so far arrested nine people including four named in the FIR registered on the complaint by Hussain’s wife Shabnam Parveen.
Of the nine accused, Sikandar Yadav had accused Hussain of theft, which he claimed led to the assault. Based on his statement, police arrested four named suspects, including Sree Yadav and Ranjan Kumar. Their statements led to the arrests of five more accused, said SDPO Hulas Kumar.
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Tale of two FIRs
Nawada police received a PCR call on the evening of 5 December that one person “suspected” of being a thief was held hostage by villagers in Bhatta, which has a mixed population of Muslims and Yadavs.
The police first took an injured Hussain to the nearest primary health care centre. He was then transferred to the district hospital, and later referred to Vardhman Institute of Medical Sciences (VIMS) in Pawapuri, where he succumbed to injuries Friday evening.
Barely hours after the assault came to light and police reached the spot, Bhatta resident Sikandar Yadav accused Hussain of stealing valuables from his house. “On 05.12.25, at around 10 pm, there was a theft in our house in which there was a gold bangle, a mangalsutra, a silver waist band, a brass vessel, along with other utensils. When I reached the village, my brother Satyanarayan Kumar and others had kept him in custody and hit him with a rod, due to which he also got injured,” Yadav alleged in his complaint.
Based on the complaint, Nawada Police booked an injured Hussain under sections 305, 317(2) and 331(4) of the BNS. These sections deal with the offence of theft, receiving or dealing in property which one knows to be stolen, and trespassing, respectively.
Soon after, Hussain’s wife filed a counter-FIR against Sikandar Yadav, his brothers Satish Kumar and Satyanaryan Kumar, along with seven others. The Nawada Police booked them under BNS sections 190, 191(2), 191(3), 126(2), 115(2), 118(1), 118(2), 117(2), 117(4), 109, 74, 303(2), 352, 351(2).
These sections deal with the offence of unlawful assembly, rioting, rioting with deadly weapon, wrongful restraint, voluntarily causing hurt, causing grievous hurt through use of weapons, punishment for causing grievous hurt, punishment for voluntarily causing grievous hurt, group violence motivated by discrimination, attempt to murder, use of criminal force to outrage the modesty of a woman, punishment for theft, insult with intent to provoke breach of peace, and criminal intimidation respectively.
Parveen had also alleged abuse and attempts of assault when she reached the village to check the whereabouts of her husband, leading police to also invoke section 74 of the BNS, 2023. Section 103 was added after Hussain’s death.
“In the morning of 6/12/25, I came to know that my husband had been caught by the villagers of Bhattha village last night, falsely accusing him of theft and beating him badly, and he was burnt with an iron rod,” Parveen alleged in her complaint to the police. Naming the accused and some unknown suspects, she alleged that the accused “tied my husband on the pretext of theft and beat him severely and seriously injured him”.
Adding, “After heating the rod, it was brandished on his body, his hand was broken, his ear was cut off with a filer, and he was tortured in many other ways. My husband had Rs 8,000, which was also taken away.”
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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