‘Firing’ at cop: Accused gets bail in first hearing

Lucknow: A week after he was arrested on charges of firing at cops when stopped from harassing girls in Hazratganj area, Lucknow University student Pulkit Shukla was on Monday granted bail by a local court on the first hearing itself.
Special judge Ram Asre Singh while granting bail to Pulkit asked him to furnish two sureties of Rs 40,000 each and also a personal bond of the same amount. A BA second year student, Pulkit was arrested on November 23 and booked for harassment of girls and attempt to murder.
Police had claimed that Pulkit and his three friends were harassing a girl near Vishnu Narayan Inter College and when the cops intervened, he fired at them. The police, however, could not recover any firearm from the boy’s possession or bullet shells from the spot. Later, the girl in a written application informed principal secretary home that Pulkit was in fact trying to save her from two miscreants and was innocent.
Arguing on behalf of the accused, advocate Pranshu Agrawal pleaded that it was a case of police high-handedness in which a person was being falsely booked. “If this is what the common man has to face, nobody will ever come to rescue a woman being harassed,” argued the counsel.
After the arrest, Pulkit’s parents had demanded examination of CCTV footage of the incident venue to verify veracity of police claim. They also demanded CB-CID probe into the incident. Pulkit's father Ram Sumiran Shukla said, “My son intervened on seeing a girl being harassed and unknowingly hit ASP Durgesh Kumar Singh during the ensuing scuffle. The actual incident will become absolutely clear if CCTV footage from the shop at Mahatma Gandhi Marg where the incident took place is examined.” The demands of the parents were supported by the social activist Nutan Thakur and her IPS husband Amitabh Thakur, in their personal capacity.
Police, however, claimed that it had statement of an eyewiteness Vishal Tiwari, who gave in witting that he saw two girls being harassed by Pulkit and his three friends who also assaulted him and clashed with the police.