After two days of violence and the death of a 36-year-old man in police firing, work at the proposed nuclear power plant in Jaitapur has been stalled as about 100 labourers have refused to remain at the site
After two days of violence and the death of a 36-year-old man in police firing, work at the proposed nuclear power plant in Jaitapur has been stalled as about 100 labourers have refused to remain at the site. Officials said the workers tried to run away from the site two times on Tuesday night.
Au00a0life wiped out: A person holds up a picture of Tabrez Sayekar at his
funeral in Nate village yesterday. Sayekar was killed in police firing
during the protests against the Jaitapur N-plant project on Monday.
Pic/Jignesh Mistry
Over 3,000 villagers from Sakhari-Nate, Madban and Mithgavane participated in the last rites of Tabrez Soyekar after namaz in the afternoon.u00a0 An uneasy calm prevailed at the obsequies of the 36-year-old who was killed in the police firing.u00a0 The standoff between the protestors, Soyekar's relatives and the police was temporarily resolved and the decision to accept the body was finally taken last morning.
To keep the proceedings out of media glare, Soyekar's body was carried out through the back door of Ratnagiri District Civil Hospital at around 11 am and loaded into the ambulance parked just outside the morgue.
Amjad Soyekar, vice-president of Machchimar Kruti Samiti, earlier, submitted a letter signed by Shireen Soyekar demanding a judicial inquiry into Monday's incident, stringent action against those responsible and scrapping the project from Jaitapur.
District Collector Madhukar Gaikwad accepted the first two demands and wrote the decision to cancel the project was a strategic one and said that the third demand would be forwarded to the Chief Minister.
The body was handed over to Tabrez's uncle Majid Ali Soyekar and then taken to Sakhari-Nate. His last rites were performed at the dafanbhumi in the village.
"Tabrez had gone out after having lunch. And we were kept in the dark for a long time about him being hit by a bullet," said Tabrez's father Abdul Sattar. "We do not want this project to happen. We were happy with our income. What they are going to give us in return by snatching away everything we have. They were offering us a job but now they have deprived us of the only earning member in our family."
Conflicting claims on firing
The youngsters in Sakhari-Nate said that police neither announced nor issued any warning before the firing. They said that as the normal practice goes, tear gas or plastic bullets were not fired before the actual firing.
PI Pramod Mulik said: "We first applied tear gas then we tried to control the crowd with lathi, we fired crowd control rounds but after protestors attacked a SRPF vehicle locking it from the outside, the order to fire was issued by the seniors. But we first fired 12 rounds in the air."
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