Bipin Rawat, the Indian Army Chief has said that if Major Leetul Gogoi is found guilty, exemplary punishment will be awarded to him.
“If any officer of the Indian army is found guilty of any offence, we will take strictest possible action,” Rawat told reporters at Pahalgham while on a visit to the Army Goodwill School.
He added, “If Major Gogoi has done something wrong, I assure you that he will be awarded punishment at the earliest…the punishment will set an example,” the army chief said.
The Jammu and Kashmir Police has initiated an inquiry into the incident involving Gogoi, whose decision to tie a civilian to the bonnet of his vehicle in Kashmir last year sparked a row.
Major Leetul Gogoi, who used a civilian Farooq Ahmed Dar as a human shield, was recently apprehended by the police with a girl in a hotel in Srinagar. CCTV footage showed Gogoi, entering the hotel where he was denied entry into the room with a girl.
However, the mother of the girl has said that the Major used to visit her home and ‘lured’ her daughter.
“I fainted when Army Major Leetul Gogoi one night barged into our house the first time and started enquiring about our well-being. He was accompanied by another man and both were in civvies. Later on I came to know that the man who is accompanying the Army Major is Sameer Mala from Lokipora Poshkar,” Arifa, the mother of local girl who was briefly detained by police along with Army Major at Srinagar hotel said.
The mother of the girl had told Kashmir Reader that Major Gogoi along with his fellow soldier Sameer Malla visited their home twice in the past two months. “They threatened us that if we told about their visits to anyone, we will be shot dead,” she said.
“We are extremely poor. Our house was washed away in the 2014 floods. Since then we have not been able to construct a new house. We live in this makeshift shed along with our large family,” she said.
In order to help them construct a better house , MLA Beerwah Omar Abdullah has released Rs1.30 Lakh in favour of the girl’s father.
