A journalist in India was violently beaten by railway police who, he said, also urinated in his mouth, in a shocking assault in western Uttar Pradesh that was highlighted on social media by his fellow media colleagues.

A video of the assault captures the moment News24 journalist Amit Sharma is hit by officers as he begs them to stop. He had been covering the derailment of a train in Shamli at the time.

“They were in plain clothes. One hit my camera and it fell down,” Sharma recalled, NDTV reports. “When I picked it up, they hit and abused me.”

#WATCH Shamli: GRP personnel thrash a journalist who was covering the goods train derailment near Dhimanpura tonight. He says, "They were in plain clothes. One hit my camera&it fell down. When I picked it up they hit&abused me. I was locked up, stripped&they urinated in my mouth" pic.twitter.com/nS4hiyFF1G — ANI UP (@ANINewsUP) June 11, 2019

He was taken to a police station where he was placed in a cell, where he was reportedly stripped and police urinated in his mouth. A number of journalists went to the police station when they heard about the incident and filmed Sharma inside his cell as he recounted what had happened. They also shared footage of the cops beating him on social media and contacted senior officers at police headquarters.

“10 to 15 days ago, I had done a story on them. The mobile phone that they snatched from me had the footage of the story,” the journalist said, after his release on Wednesday morning. Sharma told another news channel he had exposed the police for making money from unauthorized vendors and that they had tried to bribe him, HW News reports.

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Uttar Pradesh Police tweeted that two of the officers involved were going to be suspended.

The state of Uttar Pradesh is already in the spotlight over the arrest of a journalist for allegedly ‘defaming’ Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath in a tweet. The Supreme Court ordered his release from jail on Tuesday.

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