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Congress leader Hardik Patel, two party MLAs and around 27 of their supporters were detained on Wednesday, 14 August, while they were on their way to Palanpur district jail in Gujarat to meet sacked IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt, police said.
Hardik Patel, the Patidar quota agitation spearhead who joined the Congress earlier this year ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, was detained as soon as he and other party leaders entered Palanpur to go to the jail to meet Bhatt, Banaskantha Superintendent of Police Pradip Shejul said.
The two MLAs who have been detained are Mahesh Patel of Palanpur and Kirit Patel of Patan.
Sanjiv Bhatt was in June this year awarded life sentence in a custodial death case dating back to 1990 when he was posted as an additional superintendent of police in Jamnagar district.
On September 5, 2018, he was arrested in another case, where he is accused of falsely implicating a man for alleged possession of drugs in Palanpur in 1996. The trial in the case continues.
Some people recently launched a social media campaign in his support and sought rakhis, which they said will be handed over to him.
The Gujarat-cadre officer was suspended from the Indian Police Service in 2011 and sacked by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs in August 2015 on grounds of "unauthorized absence from service".
In 2012, his wife unsuccessfully contested the state Assembly poll on Congress' ticket against Prime Minister Narendra Modi from Maninagar constituency in Ahmedabad.
The Special Investigation Team appointed by the apex court to investigate the 2002 riots concluded that Bhatt, being a very junior officer then, was not present at the meeting.
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