"SP will give Rs 5 lakhs each to victims' families": Mata Prasad Pandey

"Samajwadi Party will give Rs five lakh each to the families of those killed in the Sambhal incident. Akhilesh Yadav has announced that we will soon give financial assistance to the families of the deceased. We demand from the government that it should give Rs one crore each. There should be an impartial investigation of the Sambhal incident," Leader of Opposition (LoP) Mata Prasad Pandey said in a press conference.

The senior SP leader further stated that they wanted to visit Sambhal but were stopped and were not even allowed to go to the party office in Lucknow.

"We wanted to go to Sambhal but we were stopped, we were not even allowed to go to the party office. Even today our delegation is not able to go, we will talk to Akhilesh Yadav and make a plan to go again," LoP Pandey added.

The senior SP MLA said that they would visit Sambhal only after informing the administration. "If we had to go secretly, would they have stopped us? We will go only after informing them," Pandey added.

"DM Sambhal told us that it is written in the order that we can go there with the permission of a competent officer. But the police here did not comply with the order of the District Magistrate Sambhal. We could have been stopped on the way to Sambhal but we have been stopped at home," Mata Prasad Pandey said.

While reading the notices given to him by the Uttar Pradesh police, the senior SP leader said that UP was ruled by the police and not the law.

Earlier in the day, SP leader Mata Prasad Pandey was also stopped by the police from visiting Sambhal amid heavy police deployment outside his residence. SP leaders Zia Ur Rehman Barq and Harendra Malik were also stopped by the UP police while they were travelling to Sambhal from New Delhi. (ANI)