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Police picket set ablaze, Jehanabad bandh on Sunday

A police picket was set ablaze on Saturday by angry students and villagers at Imamgunj in Bihar's Patna district following police action to disperse agitators demanding a visit by Chief Minister Rabri Devi to the spot of Friday's police firing, official sources said.

No one was injured in the latest police action, the sources said. However, eleven persons, including All India Students Association leader Sushil Kumar, were taken into custody.

The agitators sprinkled kerosene on the picket and torched it after the policemen resorted to lathi-charge, teargas and fired in the air to quell the agitators who held a demonstration with the bodies of three students on the Jehanabad-Arwal road, the sources said.

Tension mounted in the area following the recovery of bodies of the three students on Saturday from a rivulet near Beduali high school. The three were missing after Friday's police firing on a mob of students protesting the alleged assault on a student Ravindra Kumar by a militant outfit.

The firing had led to a stampede in which six students fell into a nearby rivulet and only three managed to swim to safety.

Additional para-military personnel have been rushed to Imamgunj and senior district officials are camping at the spot, the sources said. They said police later took possession of the bodies of the students identified as Santu Kumar, Prem Prakash and Shashi Kumar for post-mortem.

Ravindra Kumar was mercilessly beaten up by activists of the banned People's War Group, who held a jan adalat in his high school on August ten to punish him for allegedly misbehaving with a girl student.

Meanwhile, a fact-finding team of the Bharatiya Janata Party led by legislator Chandramohan Rai made an on-the-spot study of the situation. He later demanded a judicial inquiry into the 'unwarranted' police firing and lathi-charge on the students.

The Communist Party of India - Marxist (Leninist) has alleged that the students, whose bodies were recovered, were badly beaten up by the police and thrown into the rivulet during Friday's agitation.

The district unit of the AISA has called a 12-hour Jehanabad bandh on Sunday.

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