“Someone needs to tell me where my son got that gun and bullet from,” says 45-year-old Anju Devi, sitting on the mud floor of her two-room kuccha house in Hanumanganj village of Prayagraj district’s Koraon tehsil. 

For nearly two years, Anju has been fighting a legal battle against the Uttar Pradesh Police, seeking justice for the death of her son Vijay Kumar Soni.

According to the police, Vijay was identified as an accused in a robbery case through CCTV footage, located with the other accused with help from a tip-off at a spot called Goongwa Ka Bagh, and was shot at in “self-defence” during a gunbattle. He was taken into custody but later died of injuries in hospital.

Anju’s account sharply contradicts the official version. She alleges Vijay was picked up from their home and was already in custody two days before the staged encounter, falsely implicated in a robbery case, and shot in the arm. She further claims the police forged an affidavit using her thumbprint to assert he was not in their custody before the encounter.