Badlapur school sex abuse case: 5 police officers found responsible for custodial death of accused

Five police officers have been found responsible for the custodial death of a man accused of sexually abusing two minor girls in Badlapur, near Mumbai, in August, a Thane magistrate told the Bombay High Court on Monday, reported The Indian Express.

Based on the magistrate’s findings, a bench of Justices Revati Mohite Dere and Neela Kedar Gokhale directed the Maharashtra government to register a first information report against the personnel and start further legal proceedings.

The man, Akshay Shinde, allegedly sexually abused the minors on August 12 on the premises of their school, where he worked as a janitor. Four days later, one of the children reported the incident to her parents who approached the police. Shinde was arrested on August 17.

On September 23, Shinde died while he was being taken from Taloja Jail in Navi Mumbai to the Crime Branch office in Thane in connection with a separate case of sexual assault filed by his second wife in 2022.

The police claimed that Shinde snatched a police weapon and fired at security personnel while in transit. He injured a police officer and was shot dead in retaliatory fire, the authorities had said.

However, the magisterial inquiry into Shinde’s killing found that his fingerprints were not present on the pistol he allegedly snatched and that there was no...

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