Feared mob lynching, not police: Returned JNU students

New Delhi, Feb 22We escaped and hid ourselves fearing mob lynching and not Delhi Police, the five JNU students, who returned to the campus late on Sunday, said.

The students said they would surrender themselves if police came to arrest them from the campus.

"We were laying low and did not come to public life because we feared mob lynching and not police," Rama Naga, general secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union (JNUSU), said.

The five students, Umar Khalid, Anant Prakash Narayan, Ashutosh Kumar, Rama Naga and Anirban Bhattacharya, had disappeared from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus after the February 9 event that was held to mark the anniversaries of executions of Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru and Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front co-founder Maqbool Bhat. 

Anti-India slogans were allegedly raised at the gathering.

Earlier, Khalid, addressing students in front of the admin bloc of the JNU, said he was "not a terrorist", adding the BJP government "needed an excuse to target the campus".

"My name is Umar Khalid and I'm not a terrorist," Khalid said, condemning the media trial that branded him a terrorist.

"The attack (on the university) is not because of the program which was organised on Feburary 9, but because the government needs an excuse to attack us." 

"The media, all this while, presented a lot of things about me. The media trial, this propaganda... I know what my family is going through," he added. 

He also refuted the media reports that he made 800 calls to 'Gulf or Kashmir' a few days before the program was organised. 

JNU has been on the boil over the arrest of its students' union president Kanhaiya Kumar on sedition charges following the February 9 event.