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Delhi Police on Friday interrogated Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union president Kanhaiya Kumar, Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya together for the first time at a south Delhi police station in connection with the sedition case.
The questioning started in the wee hours of Friday and lasted for around five hours, before it resumed around 10.30 am. The interrogation is taking place at R K Puram police station, a source said.
In the first round of questioning, Kumar was confronted with Khalid and Anirban separately. In the second round, the three were grilled together. The interrogation is being conducted by at least two teams, said the source.
He claimed that Kanhaiya has so far maintained that on February 9, he came out of his room only when he got to know about a possible confrontation between two groups over the event inside the campus and has dissociated himself with the event.
While Khalid has so far denied having indulged in any anti-national sloganeering, Anirban challenged claims that the slogans pointed out by the police were anti-national in nature, the source claimed.
By questioning the three together, the police is also trying to ascertain who the organiser of the event was, what steps were taken to stop what had happened there and the identities of the outsiders spotted in the video footage of the event.
In the statement attached with the FIR, police had identified Umar and Anirban as the “main organisers” and later in the court, the investigators mentioned about the presence of “foreign elements” (outsiders) in the event.
A Delhi court had on Thursday sent JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar to one day police custody after the prosecution said that he was needed to be confronted with the other two arrested JNU students Khalid and Anirban in view of the discrepancies in their statements regarding the controversial JNU event.
While Kumar was arrested on February 12 and sent to judicial custody five days later, Khalid and Anirban surrendered before the police on Monday, a day after they resurfaced in the varsity’s campus.
All three of them were arrested in a case of sedition and criminal conspiracy registered over the controversial JNU event against the hanging of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru, in which anti-national slogans were allegedly raised.