The Uttar Pradesh Police said that members of Hindutva group All India Hindu Mahasabha in Agra slaughtered a cow ahead of the festival of Ram Navami in order to implicate three Muslim men, reported India Today.

The Agra Police had booked four men – Mohammad Rizwan, Mohammad Nakim and Mohammad Shanu and Imran Qureshi – after a complaint was filed against them for slaughtering a cow. However, police investigation later revealed that the four men had nothing to do with the incident.

“[Hindu Mahasabha leader] Sanjay Jat is the main conspirator,” Additional Commissioner of Police RK Singh told The Telegraph. “His followers and friends slaughtered a cow in the Mehtab Bagh area on the night of March 29 and told party member Jitendra Kushwaha to file a case against Mohammad Rizwan, Mohammad Nakim and Mohammad Shanu.”

Qureshi and Shanu were arrested the following day.

However, the police said that subsequent investigations revealed that Jat, a spokesperson of the Hindu Mahasabha, wanted to implicate a group of persons on account of his enmity with them.

“Jitendra [Kushwaha] was found to have lied to us during the interrogation,” Singh told The Telegraph. “He, Sanjay [Jat] and a few others were near the spot of the cow slaughter, call records suggest, not those they named in the police complaint. Call records also show that the accused persons had not gone to that spot in over a month.”

Police have said that Qureshi and Shanu will be released from jail soon.

Meanwhile, Jat claimed that the police had falsely implicated him in the case. “We will organise a protest if they don’t probe the case properly,” he said.

Jat is currently out on bail in an alleged extortion case. He and his supporters often stopped people driving vehicles carrying beef and extorted money from them by threatening to file police cases, The Telegraph quoted the police as saying.