An eight-year-boy died after allegedly being hit by a vehicle in the motorcade of Uttar Pradesh cabinet minister Om Prakash Rajbhar in Karnailganj, Gonda on Saturday.
Rajbhar is from the Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP), an ally of the BJP in UP.
The minister was on his way to attend a function in Paraspur locality of Gonda when the vehicle hit Shiva who was playing on a pavement. The boy died on the spot.
Angry villagers then blocked the road in protest. The local police eventually convinced the villagers to lift the blockade.
“A vehicle from Om Prakash Rajbhar’s convoy hit him and he died on the spot. We have registered an FIR,” Vishwanath, the father of the victim, said.
Later in the evening, chief minister Yogi Adityanath announced a relief of Rs 5 lakh for the kin of the deceased and asked the office of the director general of police to submit a detailed report on the incident.
Rajbhar maintained that the boy wasn’t hit by a car in his motorcade.
“I was informed about the incident after my cavalcade covered over 50 km from the spot. I wanted to return to the spot to call on kin of the child killed in the accident. A probe has been ordered into the incident. The vehicle which hit the boy was not part of my cavalcade. Another vehicle running behind the cavalcade hit the boy. It will be clear in probe. I am extremely sad over death of the child,” SBSP general secretary Shashi Pratap Singh quoted the minister as saying.
A delegation of SBSP headed by state unit president Anand Mishra will call on kin of the boy to express the grief over the incident.
The incident comes two days after a farmer of Orai in Uttar Pradesh’s Jalaun district alleged that the state jail minister Jai Kumar Singh Jaiki’s cavalcade, comprising more than 35 vehicles, ran over his farm, ruining all the seeds he had sowed a week back.