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Policemen remained mute spectators, as Uttaranchal Forest Minister Navprabhat and his team of wildlife officials were literally chased out of Haridwar's main market when they tried to raid a shop selling tiger skins and nails on Sunday.
Two arrested members of a notorious gang of poachers had tipped them off.
Two fresh leopard skins and a large number of tiger nails, bones and snake skins were seized from the two members belonging to the Sansar Chand gang, which has been active in Uttaranchal for a long time. The gang was also known illegally cutting trees in the region.
The Director of the Rajaji National Park, Samir Sinha, said that during interrogation it was revealed that the pair had sold off nearly 57 tiger nails and 20 tiger teeth to Messrs Aslolmal-Kanahiya Lal, a prominent trader in Haridwar's Bara Bazar.
Sinha promptly raided the trader's premises and was joined by the forest minister, who decided to drive down from Dehra Dun.
The high-profile team, accompanied by television crews and journalists from leading channels, took the shop owner by surprise.
But when they tried to take the owner Manish, alias Channa into custody, his brothers raised an alarm to call other shopkeepers, who surrounded the raiding team.
Within minutes, hundreds of shopkeepers physically released Channa from the clutches of the raiding party. The irate shopkeepers also objected to the television coverage of this entire episode and started taking out their ire against them.
Heated arguments between the minister, his team of officials and the shopkeepers soon turned into a melee and according to witnesses present, the raiding team had to literally run for their lives to escape getting lynched.
The shopkeepers chased them till the minister and the wildlife officials reached the state guesthouse, 'Dam Kothi' nearly a kilometre away. The policemen present remained mute spectators to the scene, even as Chief Minister N D Tiwari was addressing a meeting in the town.
Sinha, wild life conservator Paramjeet Singh, divisional forest officer Nishant Verma and park deputy director Narendra Singh Chaudhary were among the officials injured.
The mob also damaged video cameras belonging to TV crews.
Prem Dutt Raturi, Director General of the Uttranchal Police, however, denied the incident.
"These reports are totally false and baseless. The angry shopkeepers had gheraoed the forest officials and some of the television news teams at Bara Bazar in Haridwar on Sunday. The minister saw the angry mob and decided to return to Dehradun," Raturi told rediff.com
"We have registered three separate FIR's... we have recovered the cameras of the two television teams and the same have been restored to them. But other minor articles are yet to be recovered," he said.
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