“When other African students are treated violently in this city, I get angry and I keep thinking that it could happen to my friends and I, and yesterday it actually happened,” Endurance Amalawa told me, on 28 March 2017, when I met him at Kailash Hospital in Greater Noida. The previous day, after a protest march turned violent, a mob of protestors had attacked and severely injured Endurance and at least three other Nigerian students in the Pari Chowk area in Greater Noida. The protesters had received permission from the police department to carry out a peaceful candle light march for Manish Khari, a twelfth-standard student who died, purportedly due to drug overdose, on 25 March. In his police complaint, Khari’s father alleged that five Nigerian men, who stayed in the same colony, were responsible for his death because they had given him the drugs that led to an overdose. But the Nigerian students who were attacked on 27 March were not residents of NSG Black Cats Enclave—where Khari’s family resides—and knew little about what had happened with Khari when they were attacked.
According to a report in the Indian Express, Khari was last seen walking outside his house at 7.30 pm on the day before his death. Later that night, Khari did not return home. His family and neighbours decided to look for him. They reportedlyforced themselves into the house of the five Nigerian residents, whom they suspected to be involved in his disappearance. Upon failing to find Khari in the house, Kiranpal, Khari’s father, filed a complaint at the Kasna police station. In his initial complaint, Kiranpal alleged that the five men had kidnapped and cannibalised his son. Two of them were present in their house at that time. The police took them into preventive custody for questioning, and released them later that night.
On 25 March, Khari’s father was at the Kasna police station at 9.30 am, when he learned that his son had returned home. An hour later however, when Khari complained of heart palpitations and started to vomit, he was admitted to Yatharth Hospital. He died later that afternoon.
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