The Popular Front of India, which claims to be a social youth organisation based in Kerala with presence in in several states, and under radar ever since its members participated in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC), has said that the recent arrests of its members Anshad and Firoz by the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force (STF) is based on “a ridiculous fake story of terror attack.”
“Both the persons are residents of Kerala and had visited West Bengal and Bihar for the expansion work of the organization”, PFI said in a statement, adding, “On February 11, morning 5:40 am both of them boarded a train from Katihar, Bihar to Mumbai. As per their families they last contacted them on the evening of February 11 after which they were not reachable on their phone. The family filed a complaint at local police station in Kerala on February 16 morning.”
Soon after the family filed the complaint, alleged PFI, “UP STF hurriedly called a press conference and presented this fabricated story of their arrest and the imaginary terror attacks”, claiming, the two were arrested on February 11 and “presented” to media on February 16 in an attempt “to create a fake narrative of threat to national security”.
PFI suspects, on February 11 evening, when the train was running through UP, both of them might have been “kidnapped” a railway station in UP and “kept in illegal custody and tortured.” It said, the Yogi Adityanath government had “earlier tried to label PFI state adhoc committee members as “the mastermind of the alleged anti-CAA protest violence which the police failed to prove in the court.”
“Later”, said PFI general secretary Anil Ahmed, “The UP police also tried to link PFI to an imaginary ‘incitement of caste violence’ at Hathras by arresting three student organization activists and a journalist who were travelling to meet the family of the Hathras rape victim.”
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