22-yr-old riots victim was married a week before murder, warned brother minutes before death

New delhi: Little did 22-year-old Ashfaq Hussain know that he would be brutally murdered by a Hindu mob the week after his wedding in Uttar Pradesh's Bulandshahr district. Like many of the victims of the north-east Delhi riots, Ashfaq was among a group of three Muslim men, all in their early 20s, who were killed by a rioting Hindu mob near the Brijpuri pulia on February 25.

However, in the few hours before his death, he managed to warn his brother — most probably saving his life — and desperately tried contacting his uncle before dying.

According to the chargesheet filed by Delhi Police in Ashfaq's murder case (FIR no. 159/2020 PS Dayalpur), the last call he made before dying was to his uncle Javed Hussain, whom he had met even minutes before being murdered. According to what Javed told police, he had met his nephew near the Brijpuri pulia around 5pm when he was getting medicines for his mother and both were nervous about the situation at the time.

Javed said that he lost sight of Ashfaq in the crowds soon and following that he had called him twice in an attempt to find him - which he could not. By 7pm, family members heard that the 22-year-old had been injured and were repeatedly trying to call him.

However, Ashfaq's brother Mudasir Abbas - who works as an AC repair mechanic - told police that one of the last things that his brother had done for him was to warn him about the worsening situation in Brijpuri. Mudasir told the police that his brother had warned him about the situation around 5 pm and asked him not to come there. However, after finishing his shift, Mudasir managed to cautiously reach home around 7 pm when their father asked him to go look for Ashfaq.

"When I got to near the Farooqia Masjid I saw my brother being carried by three to four men. Seeing my brother that way, I fell unconscious, and by the time I regained consciousness, he was nowhere to be seen. I eventually found him at Al-Hind Hospital," he told police, according to case documents accessed by Millennium Post.

According to the post mortem conducted on Ashfaq's body, he had been brutally beaten and had died after being stabbed in the chest with a sharp object that went right through the heart. Doctors noted that Ashfaq had received 31 injuries on his head, chest and limbs, of which six were stab wounds, just one of which would have been sufficient to kill him.

Significantly, Javed told police that Ashfaq was married in Bulandshahr's Sakhani village, the week before he died. In his testimony to the cops, Javed said he left Delhi to attend the wedding after February 11 and returned on February 18. He said he had come to Delhi from Hyderabad, where he works at a hotel, just for the wedding. Javed said he knew Ashfaq since they were both children.

And while Mudasir was trying to get Ashfaq from Al-Hind to the Urban hospital to the GTB hospital, before getting confirmation of his death, relatives like Javed desperately tried to reach him on the phone but in vain. Mudasir said that by the time he reached GTB hospital with Ashfaq, doctors there had declared him dead.