Colleagues of two Uttar Pradesh constables arrested on the charge of shooting dead an Apple executive are alleged to have started a fundraising campaign for their legal defence in a social media drive that senior police officials said amounted to internal indiscipline.

Media reports said the savings account of the wife of one of the accused constables had shown a substantial increase over the past 48 hours, although it couldn’t be independently confirmed.

An official with the state’s home department said if the reports were true, it would send a “horrible signal”.

Constables Prashant Chaudhary and Sandeep Kumar Rana have been arrested on the charge of shooting Vivek Tiwari when the Apple executive was on his way home early on Saturday.

The constables who were on a motorbike had intercepted Tiwari, who was with a woman colleague he had planned to drop at her home.

Chaudhary had shot Tiwari, claiming that the executive caught in an “intimate position” with the woman had hit their motorcycle thrice with his car with the intention of killing him.

The constable, arrested with Rana on Saturday, had sat on a dharna at a police station to mount pressure on his bosses to register a counter-FIR against the dead executive.

Some constables, according to the reports, later started the campaign on social media to collect funds to defend Chaudhary and Rana who have since been suspended.

The reports said there had been a substantial increase of funds in the savings account of Chaudhary’s wife Rakhi Mallik over the past two days. No employee of the bank was, however, willing to speak.

At least two policemen said to have been campaigning in support of Chaudhary till Sunday had by Monday morning removed from their Facebook accounts all posts related to either the shooting or the purported funds-collection drive.

But an official in the state’s home department told this newspaper the way the colleagues of the arrested cops had been reacting was a “horrible signal”.

“We cannot let this happen. We will hold a meeting with senior officers on Tuesday to deal with the rebel

cops. O.P. Singh, the director-general of police, has already said the two cops were guilty of murder and would be treated like any criminal,” the official said, asking not to be named.

Rajiv Krishna, additional director-general, Lucknow zone, said: “We have come to know from the media about fund collection for Chaudhary and Rana. An inquiry must be done with regard to such kind of indiscipline.”

Tiwari’s widow Kalpana met chief minister Yogi Adityanath at his official residence on Monday morning but refused to reveal what they discussed.

“I am satisfied with the action taken by the state government in the murder case of my husband,” she said.

The government has offered her Rs 25 lakh as compensation and a job in the Lucknow Nagar Nigam. The

government on Monday announced Rs 5 lakh each for Tiwari’s mother and his two daughters.

Kalpana had said on Sunday the state police were trying to protect the accused cops and she should be given Rs 1 crore as compensation.

A source in the police said Chaudhary was popularly known as “PK (Prashant Kumar) Don” in the department because he extorted money from lovers on Shaheed Path at night.

Shaheed Path is a road

people travelling to Barabanki or Faizabad can take if they want to bypass Lucknow city while coming from Kanpur.

The spot where Tiwari was killed in the Gomti Nagar extension area is a service lane for Shaheed Path.