Hashimpura Massacre: The Delhi High Court sentenced life imprisonment 16 police officers of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) in the 1987 Hashimpura massacre case on Wednesday.
The bench of Justices hearing the Hashimpura Massacre case included Justice S Muralidhar and Justice Vinod Goel. The bench said that the “massacre of 42 persons of a minority community in Hashimpura was targeted killing of unarmed and defenseless persons. Families had to wait 31 years for justice.”
A day before Hindu-Muslim riot took place in 1987, an armed police force allegedly circled around hundreds of Muslim men in Hashimpura and randomly picked some of them on their finger point to carry them in a truck to a nearby lake. There the armed police shot the Muslim men one by one.
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Last week the Uttar Pradesh government reached Delhi High Court in an attempted to get the Provincial Armed Constabulary men released from the charges of murder, attempt to murder, tampering with evidence and conspiracy in the Hashimpura massacre case. The massacre alone had witnessed 42 killings in Meerut.
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A charge sheet was filed before the Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM), Ghaziabad, in 1996, where 19 people were named as accused and charges for offences of murder. attempt to murder, tampering with evidence and conspiracy were framed against 17 of them by the court in New Delhi on 2006 after the case was transferred to Delhi on a Supreme Court direction in September 2002.
