india

Updated: Aug 12, 2020 00:50 IST

The Uttar Pradesh Police has released a video of the violence in Meerut during the protests against citizenship law in which the cops are being attacked by the protesters.

The series of photos and videos released by the police show two men firing at cops during the protests in Meerut last Friday. While 16 people died across the state during clashes over the past week, Meerut registered the highest number of deaths at six.

In one of the videos, a masked man in a blue jacket is seen walking around with a gun.

Though many of the bodies of those killed in violence bore gunshot wounds, the police maintained that they did not shoot anything other than plastic pellets and rubber bullets. The only place in UP where the police has admitted that a protester was killed in firing is Bijnor.

The video has been released by the police to justify their claims of being attacked by anti-CAA protesters.

“As many as 288 policemen were injured in violence that erupted across 21 districts. Sixty-two of them suffered firearm injuries,” Uttar Pradesh Director General of Police (DGP) OP Singh said at a press conference held over the weekend.

He said that the police have recovered 500 cartridges of prohibited bores from places where violence broke out.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had slammed the protesters for violence, saying there was a need to “introspect”.

“People who damaged public property and were involved in violence in the name of protest in UP should introspect if what they did was right,” PM Modi said at an event in Lucknow on Wednesday.

Earlier this week, the Mangaluru Police released video clips purportedly showing protesters carrying stones in an auto trolley, hurling them at the security personnel and trying to destroy CCTV cameras during a protests against the law.

The video footage of the protest that took place on December 19 was released on Monday after the Opposition Congress and the Janata Dal (Secular), or JDS, claimed that innocent people had died in the police firing.