Badlapur Accused Encountered By Maharastra Police; Police Calls It self Defence, Family Accuses Conspiracy

Akshay Shinde, accused of sexually assaulting two minors at a school in Badlapur town of Maharashtra's Thane district was shot dead by police, what was later termed as an act in “self-defence”. Police claimed Shinde snatched a revolver from a cop and had opened fire but in retaliatory firing from the side of the officers, he had sustained bullet injuries and had succumbed to them when taken to hospital on Monday.


The Thane crime branch had procured his custody and was on the go to Thane for investigation from Taloja jail. In the evening as the vehicle had reached the Mumbra by-pass, police claimed Shinde had opened two or three rounds of firing, followed by retaliatory firing from the side of the police. Akshay Shinde’s family, however, has called this a “cold-blooded encounter”

“My son was even scared of bursting fire-crackers, he can’t open fire. When I met him at the jail last Monday, he had claimed that he was assaulted inside the jail. Police have conspired to encounter my son. The school management must be probed. We will not accept the body without a thorough investigation”, said Anna Shinde, Akshay’s father. His mother while speaking to ‘Hindustan Times’ claimed that “this encounter could have been done at the behest of a political leader”.

The matter had soon snowballed into a political showdown between the ruling BJP and the opposition. NCP (SP) chief Sharad Pawar has called the home department’s laxity ‘suspicious’, and sought an in-depth probe in the issue. The Congress has asked for a judicial inquiry by a sitting judge of the Bombay High Court. Dy Chief Minister Devender Fadnavis, on the other hand, had backed the police action, endorsing it as “self-defence”. “What happened in Badlapur is shocking. The same opposition then had been asking for the accused be hanged, today questioning the action of police. Are they siding with a person who had done something so heinous to two little girls”, asked Maharastra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.

Soon after the allegations came to light, massive protests had rocked the streets and at local railway station last month in Maharastra’s Badlapur. The school had appointed the 23-year-old Akshay Shinde as the toilet cleaner, taken on a contractual basis. But he had allegedly sexually assaulted two minor students on multiple occasions.