NOIDA: A case has been registered against the developers of Cleo County and four police constables for allegedly beating up lawyer inside a police outpost over a land dispute in Sector 121 on Sunday.Amit Modi, the director of ABA Corp, the developer of Cleo County, and another senior official, Suneel Galhot, have been named in the complaint. A spokesperson for the company said they would contest the FIR in court.Trouble began when Mahindra Singh, a resident of Gadhi Chaukhandi village who practises as a lawyer in Surajpur district and sessions court, alleged he had not been paid compensation for a piece of land that the Noida Authority had acquired from him and handed it over to ABA Corp. “The Noida Authority arbitrarily acquired our land and handed it over to the developer. We have not received compensation for our land. A petition was filed from our side and the matter is being heard in Allahabad high court,” Singh said.The lawyer had been apparently distributing pamphlets persuading homebuyers against investing in the Cleo County project in Sector 121, which has been built on land apparently acquired from him and his relatives. On Sunday, he was telling homebuyers that the project was mired in legal tangles when the developers reached the spot. “Police pushed us inside a van and brought us to the police chowki. There, they thrashed me,” Singh said.Singh alleged that a few policemen even tried to strangulate him and claimed his cousin had captured the incident on his mobile phone. In solidarity with Singh, lawyers had held three-day protest in Surajpur court and stalled work, demanding that an FIR be registered against the developers and the constables.Akhilesh Tripathi, SHO of Phase III police station, said a case under Sections 147 (rioting), 307 (attempt to murder), 323 (voluntarily causing hurt) and 504 (intentional insult to provoke breach of peace) of the IPC had been lodged against the builders and four constables. One constable, Virendra, was suspended while seven police personnel in total were sent to the police lines.A spokesperson for the developer said the FIR was “grossly unfair”. “None of the representatives of Cleo County, including the ones mentioned in the FIR, were physically present in the police chowki when the incident took place. No representative was part of any physical confrontation, which can be corroborated with CCTV footage,” the spokesperson said in a statement.The statement further said that a few people had been gathering for the past four days outside the Cleo County project, where around 2,500 residents live at present. “We are responsible for their safety, so our staff had no choice but to call the local police for help. These miscreants had started harassing residents, homebuyers and staff members,” it said.The developer said the events mentioned in the complaint by Singh, if true, would have happened when police took charge of the situation. It said land on which the project was being developed had been bought directly from the Noida Authority in 2006. “If there is a compensation pending, it has to be sought from the Authority or the court,” it said.An Authority official said no rule had been bypassed during the acquisition. “We had released compensation. But they are demanding more.”

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