Top cop apologises to HC, insists rape probe proper

Delhi Police commissioner Neeraj Kumar tendered an unconditional apology before Delhi high court on Thursday, a day after the court asked why no action was taken against him for failing to prevent the gang rape last month. Harish V Nair reports.

Delhi Police commissioner Neeraj Kumar tendered an unconditional apology before Delhi high court on Thursday, a day after the court asked why no action was taken against him for failing to prevent the gang rape last month.

“I am tendering an unconditional apology on behalf of the commissioner and I bow my head before your lordship,” Delhi Police counsel Dayan Krishnan told a bench of chief justice D Murugesan and justice VK Jain, which is monitoring the police probe into the incident.

Krishnan was flanked by deputy commissioner (south) Chhaya Sharma and many other police officials while tendering the apology on behalf of the commissioner.

The court was also angry at the two unsatisfactory affidavits filed by the police earlier without furnishing the details the court wanted.

Kumar later told HT: "The unconditional apology rendered by the police is for the inadvertent omission in the status report of the identity of the personnel aboard the PCR van which ferried the victims to the Safdarjung Hospital, and not for any alleged or seeming 'mishandling' of investigations into the case."

A 23-year-old woman was raped and assaulted by six men on a moving bus in south Delhi. She died on December 29 at a Singapore hospital. Police filed a chargesheet against five of the accused on January 3 accusing them of kidnapping, murder, gangrape, unnatural sex and dacoity. The sixth accused is a juvenile.

The bench accepted the police's apology and was satisfied with a fresh affidavit, detailing the action the police had taken so far against the errant cops and listing the names of policemen posted at the barricades and in the three PCR vans on duty on the routes the rogue bus travelled.

The police told the court that an assistant commissioner and three constables on patrolling duty had been suspended and probe against many others were also on. Angry at the failure of the police to prevent the gangrape, the bench asked counsel on Wednesday why only an ACP or a DCP had been suspended and why not the police commissioner.