The Special Cell of the Delhi Police arrested a 29-year-old man from northeast Delhi's Harsh Vihar on Wednesday for allegedly slaughtering a cow with a design to trigger communal tension on the occasion of Holi, the police said.
The accused, Imran, a resident of Ghaziabad, was hiding somewhere in Uttarakhand and had come to meet his family members near Loni, from where he was nabbed in the morning, they said.
Earlier, Imran's associates Parvaiz, Lukman and Insallaham were nabbed by the police but the former went underground after which a reward of Rs 25,000 was announced on his arrest, the police said.
According to the police, the incident was reported on Holi on March 21. The residents of Harsh Vihar had approached the police after they found the body parts of a cow and an animal fetus lying near the boundary wall of a vacant plot.
The situation turned tense as the locals staged a protest against the alleged cow slaughter. The police pacified the protesters and brought the situation under control.
A case was registered and a probe launched. Raids were conducted in Delhi and Uttarakhand and following a tip-off, Imran was nabbed, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell) P S Kushwah said.
"During interrogation, he disclosed that the act was done to disturb communal harmony and spread hatred among the Hindus and Muslims living in the area in order to provoke riots and trigger a serious law-and-order problem in the national capital," the officer said.
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Imran's family was into selling and purchasing of cattle, he added.
According to the plan, the accused slaughtered a cow and "mischievously" threw the body parts of the animal in Harsh Vihar, the DCP said.
Imran was also allegedly involved in poisoning a buffalo to death in 2016 in Loni. The same year, he was arrested by the Harsh Vihar police station in a case under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, the DCP said.
Imran kept on changing his hideouts in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Delhi-NCR in order to evade arrest in the present case, the police said.