BY Bizodisha Bureau, January 29, 2015###

Irate villagers on Thursday locked the main gate of Bhushan Steel Limited’s plant at Meramundali in Odisha’s Dhenkanal district soon after security personnel fired and injured three children bathing in a pond close to the plant premises.

The two injured Manoj Naik and Laxmidhar Naik have been  admitted in        hospital at Angul.

“We were bathing in the pond when the security personnel of Bhushan fired on us without any provocation,” said Laxmidhar, one of the injured. There were six children out of whom three were injured, two of them seriously, in the firing, he added.

Villagers rushed to the place and locked up the main gate of the plant afte they came to know about the firing, and staged a blockade. Tension prevailed at the site for quite some time as the protesters demanded action against the culprits and compensation to the victims of the firing.

There was normalcy only after police arrived on the scene and took three security personnel, including the one who allegedly pulled the trigger, into custody. “We have taken three persons into custody and are questioning them to ascertain the circumstances in which the firing took place,” inspector Jitendra Kumar Sahoo of Meramundali police station said. There has been no official word on the incident from Bhushan Steel Limited.