Victim recounts hate rants, abuse, threats by train killer in 2016

Years before Railway Protection Force (RPF) constable Chetan Singh killed his senior and three Muslim men aboard the Jaipur-Mumbai Central Superfast Express in a hate crime on July 31, he harassed over the course of several days, and then unlawfully detained, assaulted and threatened to frame a 45-year-old Muslim auto driver in Ujjain as a “terrorist”, the victim of that abuse, Wahid Khan told HT.

- Shruti Tomar

 

The incessant abuse, with constant communal overtones, forced Khan to file a complaint against Singh. An inquiry was launched more than a year after the first complaint, and the policeman was eventually transferred to Bhavnagar in Gujarat.

Khan first came across Singh, who was posted in the dog squad of RPF, in the middle of 2016. He was an auto driver and his usual parking spot was near the “maal godaam”(luggage warehouse) of the Ujjain railway station. “One day, in the middle of 2016, Chetan saw me and asked me my name. There was a viciousness to him but he said nothing at that time. But from then, whenever he saw me, he would get me to take him to far off places for what he called ‘work’. He barely ever paid. Then he started to ask me to pick up things from his house and drop them. Initially I said nothing, but I began to realise he was targeting me,” Khan said.